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Friday, October 22, 2004

Mobile Agents

A paradigm shift in Distributed Computing
There are three main computing paradigms for distributed computing - client-server, remote evaluation, code-on-demand.

Client-Server :
One computational entity B advertises a set of services and is placed at node NB. Resources and code needed for service execution are hosted by NB. Result is delivered back to client with some additional interaction.
eg. CORBA, Java RMI, EJB, Webservies.

Remote Evaluation :Entity A has the code necessary to perform the services but it lacks the resources required which is at NB. A sends service code to B computational entity located at NB. eg. SQL from client to server.

Code On Demand :
Entity A is able to access resources at NA. Thus A interacts with entity B at NB by requesting service code which is located at NB.
eg. Java Applets

Mobile Agent :
Entity A initially hosted by node NA, encapsulates service code but some of resources are located on NB. A migrates to NB carrying the code and possibly some intermediate results.

Development systems :
  • Agent Development Kit (ADK) from Tryllion solutions
  • Grasshopper (IKV++ Technology)
  • Voyager (Recursion Softworks)
  • Aglets (IBM)
  • Bee-gent (Toshiba)

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