A.I. Wang, C.-F. Sørensen, and E. Indal (Norway)
: Mobile agents, Mobile Computing, Mobile De vices
This paper describes an approach for running mobile agents on various devices from mobile phones and Personal Dig ital Assistants (PDAs) to powerful PCs. Most mobile de vices suffer from limited computation resources (mem ory and processors), limited network connection and band width, and limited battery life. Mobile agents are a promis ing technology for minimizing the problems described above. However, most mobile agent systems today are very resource demanding both for the client and the server. In this paper we propose a simple mobile agent architec ture that makes it possible to access a mobile agent system on various devices. This architecture proposes that clients will state their capabilities. Based on these capabilities, the client will either run the full mobile agent on the device or only run a light-weight version of the agent on the device. In our new approach, the mobile agents are basically the same on all clients, but for small mobile devices the code of the mobile agent is removed. This means that for mo bile devices with minimal resources, only the data of the agent can be changed. The code of this agent is stored at the server. When the agent returns to the server, the two parts are joined and the agent is ready to be executed. The joined mobile agent can migrate to other agent servers and clients.
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