Supporting mobile agent applications using wrappers

The TACOMA project has investigated software support for mobile agents. Several prototypes have been developed, with experiences in distributed applications directing the effort. The paper presents a mechanism that supports implementing agent applications by creating troops of agents using wrappers. This solution requires little extra support from the agent system, and may be used to construct applications with a wide variety of functionality requirements. We show how this mechanism can be used to dynamically install (3rd party) components at agent servers. We demonstrate this concept with a dynamically installed service locator which uses the Gnutella peer-to-peer protocol