A multiplatform mobile agent system based on web services - by Elie Joe Kahale

Abstract

Mobile Agent, an emerging paradigm in the world of distributed applications, is gaining wide acceptance in different research and market areas such as networking, artificial intelligence, distributed systems and so on. The development and deployment of different mobile agent systems to suit different needs and requirements led to a heterogeneous environment and the adoption of several middle ware systems to handle multi platform systems. In this report, we describe a new architecture to handle heterogeneity and multi platform mobile agent systems using Web services. Web service, a standard protocol based on XML and HTTP, seems to be a promising technique to handle eterogeneity. Our Architecture consists of three parts that are mainly the factory, the mo bile agent and the host web service. The agent migrates from host to host by using Web services techniques such as SOAP protocol and XML RPC. The transfer of mo bile agent, source code and state, is based on SOAP attachments and the concept of handler which allows the manipulation of SOAP messages to integrate file attachments before sending the message through the network. After implementing the proposed architecture, a demo application was developed and the system was tested on different platforms. Finally some metrics were measured such as response time and throughput to evaluate the performance of our system.