Mobile Agent Migration Based on Code Caching

Network-based system requires us to implement both a client-side and server-side program. The update of a client-side program involves the update of a server-side program, and vise versa. To reduce this inconvenience, mobile agent-based programming is attractive to design, implement and maintain distributed systems. Because a mobile agent migrates from one computer to other computer and can continues its execution, both a client-side and server-side program is not required to be implemented. The migration of a mobile agent, however, causes increase of data traffic. Therefore, many researchers proposed methods to reduce a number of agents migration. However the effectiveness of these approaches is limited because they depend on mobile agent behaviors. Furthermore, they restrict the implementation of mobile agents. In this paper, we focus on an agent runtime environment and try to reduce data traffic in mobile agent migrations. In our proposal, an agent runtime environment caches agent codes and agent status. Cached codes and status are reuse when a mobile agent comes back again. Thus, our method enables to reduce data traffics caused by mobile agent migration at the agent runtime environment level. Moreover, our proposed method allows us flexible implementations of mobile agents, since an agent runtime environment is independent from the mobile agent behaviors. We have applied our method on a mobile agent framework, called Maglog, and conducted experimental results. The results show 52% improvement of mobile agent migration time.