A reliable and flexible architecture based on CORBA and mobile agents for e-commerce

Because of their autonomy, flexibility and efficiency, mobile agents have become a hot topic in the e-commerce field. Meanwhile, another distributed technology, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), has a reliable, scalable and standard distributed structure. CORBA can be accepted as a platform for e-commerce because e-commerce is actually an important distributed implementation. Therefore, the integration of mobile agents and CORBA has become a new field in the e-commerce world. In this paper, we provide a reliable and flexible e-commerce architecture, which absorbs the advantages of mobile agents and CORBA, and adopts some suitable implementations for security protocols and quality of service (QoS). The paper also introduces new viewpoints, such as QoS implementation through CORBA events and flexible choices of different security protocols through the interfaces of atomic operations.