Abstract
We describe a platform for the portable and secure execution of mobile agents written in various interpreted languages on top of a common run-time core. Agents may migrate at any point in their execution, fully preserving their state, and may exchange messages with other agents. One system may contain many virtual places, each establishing a domain of logically related services under a common security policy governing all agents at this place. Agents are equipped with allowances limiting their resource accesses, both globally per agent lifetime and locally per place. We discuss aspects of this architecture and report about ongoing work.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
ARNOLD, K. and GOSLING, J. (1996) The Java Programming Language, Addison-Wesley, Reading (MA), USA.
CHESS, D., GROSOF, B. and HARRISON, C (1995) Itinerant Agents for Mobile Computing, Research Report RC-20010, IBM Th. J. Watson Research Center. http://www.research.ibm.com:8080/main-cgi-bin/gunzip_paper.pl?/PS/172.ps.gz
CONDICT, M., MILOJICIC, D., REYNOLDS, F. and BOLINGER, D. (1996) Towards a World-Wide Civilization of Objects, Proc. of the 7th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, September 9–11th, Connemara, Ireland. http://www.osf.org/RI/DMO/WebOs.ps.
GENERAL MAGIC, Inc. (1995) The Telescript Language Reference, Sunnyvale (CA), USA. http://cnn.genmagic.com/Telescript/TDE/TDEDOCS_HTML/telescript.html
GRAY, R. (1996) Agent-Tcl: A Flexible and Secure Mobile Agent system, Proc. of the 4th annual Tcl/Tk workshop (ed. by M. Diekhans and M. Roseman), July, Monterey, CA, USA. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edU/∼agent/papers/tc196.ps.Z
HYLTON, J., MANHEIMER, K., DRAKE, F., WARSAW, B., MASSE, R., and VAN ROSSUM, G. (1996) Knowbot Programming: System support for mobile agents, Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Object Orientation in Operating Systems, Oct. 27–28, Seattle, WA, USA. http://the-tech.mit.edu/∼jeremy/iwooos.ps.gz
HORTON, M.R. and ADAMS, R. (1987) Standard for interchange of USENET messages, Internet RFC 1036, AT&T Bell Laboratories and Center for Seismic Studies, December. http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1036.txt.
JOHANSEN, D., van RENESSE, R. and SCHNEIDER, F. B. (1995) An Introduction to the TACOMA Distributed System, Technical Report 95-23, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Tromsø, Norway. http://www.cs.uit.no/Lokalt/Rapporter/Reports/9523.html.
LANGE, D. (1996) Programming Mobile Agents in Java — A White Paper, IBM Corp. http://www.ibm.co.jp/trl/aglets/whitepaper.htm
LINGNAU, A. DROBNIK, O. and DÖMEL, P. (1995) An HTTP-based Infrastructure for Mobile Agents, Proc. of the 4th International WWW Conference, December, Boston (MA), USA. http://www.w3.org/pub/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/150/.
MAYFIELD, J., LABROU, Y. and FININ, T. (1995) Desiderata for Agent Communication Languages, Proc. of the AAAI Symposium on Information Gathering from Heterogeneous, Distributed Environments, AAAI-95 Spring Symposium, Stanford University, Stanford (CA). March 27–29, 1995. http://www.cs.umbc.edu/kqml/papers/desiderata-acl/root.html.
OBJECT MANAGEMENT GROUP (1996) CORBA 2.0 specification, OMG document ptc/96-03-04, http://www.omg.org/docs/ptc/96-03-04.ps.
OUSTERHOUT, J. K., LEVY, J., and WELCH, B. (1996) The Safe-Tcl Security Model, draft, Sun Microsystems Labs, Mountain View, CA, USA. http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/safeTcl.ps
PEINE, H. (1997) Ara — Agents for Remote Action, in Itinerant Agents: Explanations and Examples with CD-ROM, ed. by W. Cockayne and M. Zyda, Manning/Prentice Hall. To appear 1.
RANGANATHAN, M., ACHARYA, A., SHARMA, S., and SALTZ, J. (1997) Network-Aware Mobile Programs, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland, MD, USA. To appear in USENIX'97. p://www.cs.umd.edu/∼acha/papers/usenix97-submitted.html
STRASSER, M., BAUMANN, J. and HOHL, F. (1996) Mole — A Java Based Mobile Agent System, Proc. of the 2nd ECOOP Workshop on Mobile Object Systems, University of Linz, Austria, July 8—9. http://www.informatik. uni-stuttgart.de/ipvr/vs/Publications/1996-strasser-01.ps.gz
STOLPMANN, T. (1995) MACE-Eine abstrakte Maschine als Basis mobiler Anwendungen, diploma thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. German text and English abstract at http://www.uni-kl.de/AG-Nehmer/Ara/mace.html.
WHITE, J. (1996) A Common Agent Platform, position paper for the Joint WWW Consortium/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code, June 24–25, Boston, MA, USA. http://www.genmagic.com/internet/cap/w3c-paper.htm.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Peine, H., Stolpmann, T. (1997). The architecture of the ara platform for mobile agents. In: Rothermel, K., Popescu-Zeletin, R. (eds) Mobile Agents. MA 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1219. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62803-7_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62803-7_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-62803-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68695-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive