Recently, a new paradigm has emerged forstructuring and developing distributed network applications inopen distributed and heterogeneous environments. Manyapplication areas, such as electronic commerce, mobilecomputing, network management and information retrieval canbenefit from the application of the Mobile Agent technology. Theexploitation of Mobile Agents offers several peculiar advantages,such as reduction of network latency, asynchronous execution,robust and fault tolerant behavior. Java technology provides aplatform-independent, portable software environment whichmakes it an excellent tool for mobile agent development. MobileAgents are mainly intended to be used for applicationsdistributed over large scale (slow) networks because they allowsaving communication costs by moving computation to the hoston which the target data resides. However, it has not becomepopular due to some problems such as security. In this paper, wepresent a distributed network architecture based on the MobileAgent approach. A network of communicating servers each ofwhich support multiple clients is our goal. We also propose asecurity approach for mobile agents, which protect critical dataof mobile agents from malicious attacks, by using cryptographictechniques. We implement a bank service application to be testedon our mobile agent framework. The results suggest that fornetworks with high latency, Mobile Agents may provideimprovements over more conventional client-server systems
