Mobile agent platform design optimisations for minimising network overhead and latency in agent migrations

The emphasis of research projects in the field of mobile agent (MA) technology has been mainly put on identifying applications where the employment of MAs is preferable compared to centralised or alternative distributed computing models. Very little has been done though on examining how MA platforms design could be optimised so as to minimise the network traffic and latency associated with MA transfers. The work presented herein addresses these issues by investigating the effect of several optimisation ideas applied on our MA platform prototype. Furthermore, we discuss the results of a set of timing experiments aimed at offering a better understanding of the agent migration process and suggesting ways for reducing MA transfer delays.