Dynamic configuration of agent migration protocols for the Internet

This paper presents a framework for building network protocols for migrating mobile agents over the Internet. The framework allows network protocols for agent migration to be naturally implemented within mobile agents and then dynamically deployed at network hosts by migrating the agents that perform the protocols. It is built on a hierarchical mobile agent system, called MobileSpaces, and several protocols for agent migration are designed and implemented based on standard protocols in the Internet, for example agent migration protocols through plain TCP, HTTP, SMTP or SSL, and application-specific routing protocols for efficiently migrating agents among multiple hosts. This paper describes the framework and its prototype implementation, which uses Java as both the implementation language and the protocol development language