Design and Implementation of a Distributed Agent Delivery System

Abstract

Among the most significant changes that have affected the domain of computer networking is the proliferation of distributed applications and services, particularly within wide-area networks such as corporate intranets and most notably within the Internet. As the demand for such applications and services continues to expand, the need for a generic, open solution facilitating the distribution of data and services becomes increasingly apparent. Researchers have recently begun to investigate the feasibility of using the Mobile Agents Paradigm as an integral part of distributed computing infrastructures. In addition to facilitating the exchange of data and the access to services, agents serve as abstractions that separate the communication of data from the location and format of data that is transferred among the nodes of the distributed environment. This paper discusses the goals, design and implementation of a particular multilingual mobile agent development kit, the Distributed Agent Delivery System (DADS). DADS supports multiple agent languages types, and is deemed sufficiently lightweight to be deployed in performance-sensitive environments. DADS thus provides the fundamental mechanisms for the development of distributed applications that would scale well with the ever-increasing size and complexity of modern distributed infrastructures.