SPRINGS: a scalable platform for highly mobile agents in distributed computing environments

In the last decade, mobile agents have arisen as a promising paradigm to build distributed and mobile computing applications. However, mobile agents have not been massively adopted. One of the reasons could be that some issues have yet to be solved to increase the confidence of developers. Thus, scalability problems sometimes arise in applications with a high number of mobile agents when calls and trips happen very frequently. In this paper we present SPRINGS, a novel Java-based mobile agent system which is scalable, flexible, and easy to use. Our work has been motivated by our experience with mobile agents in several research projects. We focus on scalability issues and efficient maintenance of location-independent agent references in dynamic scenarios where agents communicate and travel frequently among computers. We have obtained encouraging performance results through an extensive set of experiments. Moreover, our tests show that SPRINGS achieves a degree of concurrency that other well-known platforms cannot reach