A mechanism for tracking mobile agents in a cluster topology

The off-line operation capability and the autonomy of mobile agents make it necessary to incorporate an agent tracking mechanism in a system based on mobile agents for such tasks as coordination, communications, cancellations, and etc. Several tracking model have been established; yet most of them use report messages from mobile agents to update their location tables. It is easy and direct, but will exacerbate network traffics when enormous agents are roaming. Worse is it when agents are traveling far and hopping frequently, report messages with long journey are also inadequate for applications with critical timing; they may be lost or too late for some import occasion. These problems, referred to as remote agent problems, are dealt with in this paper, using a tracking model based on a cluster topology. All the reporting messages are confined to a cluster to keep the network traffics to a minimum. Although the simulations have shown that the proposed model is no better than other models in some aspects, it can eliminate the disadvantages of these models. In addition, the remote agent problem can also be resolved. This mobile agent tracking model, with its generality, can therefore be used in any size scale of networks.