Quantitative Evaluation of Pairwise Interactions between Agents

Abstract

Systems comprised of multiple interacting mobile agents provide an alternate network computing paradigm that integrates remote data access, message exchange and migration; which up until now have largely been considered independently. This paper focuses on basic one-to-one agent interactions, or paradigms, which can be used as building blocks; allowing larger system characteristics and performance to be understood in terms of their combination. This paper defines three basic agent paradigms and presents associated performance models. The paradigms are evaluated quantitatively in terms of network traffic, overall processing time and size of memory used, in the context of a distributed DB system developed using the Bee-gent Agent Framework. Comparison of the results and models illustrates the performance trade-off for each paradigm, which are not represented in the models, and some implementation issues of agent frameworks.