A Fully Distributed Mechanism for Locating Mobile Agents

In this paper we propose a method based on distributed hashing to locate mobile agents in a system. The strategy is fully distributed, and transparent to the client that is performing the locating request; moreover, it is scalable and efficient. The idea is to treat mobile agents and hosts similarly to the way peers are treated in a Peer-to-peer system, and to implement a lookup protocol that is based on that principle, while taking care of the mobile nature of the agents. We also introduce the notion of Agent Pool, which allows us to reuse mobile agents that might be idle in the system instead of creating new ones at each request.