Mobile agents for personalized information retrieval: when are they a good idea?

Mobile agent technology has been proposed as an alternative to traditional client-server computing for personalized information retrieval by mobile and wireless users from fixed wired servers. We develop a very simplified analytical model that examines the claimed performance benefits of mobile agents over client-server computing for a mobile information retrieval scenario. Our evaluation of this simple model shows that mobile agents are not necessarily better than client-server calls in terms of average response times; they are only beneficial if the space overhead of the mobile agent code is not too large or if the wireless link connecting the mobile user to the fixed servers of the virtual enterprise is error-prone. We quantify the tradeoffs involved for a variety of scenarios and point out issues for further research