Using Reprogrammable Coordination Media as Mobile Agent Execution Environments

In this paper, we propose to design a mobile agent execution environment, based on the bare coordination media. To do this, we discuss two ways to enhance a coordination medium. First, we introduce a way to add system specific non-functional behaviour (such as performance, security) to the medium, in order to add dynamism to the otherwise fixed coordination laws. Our current research focuses on reprogrammable coordination media by means of a reflexive architecture. Second, we discuss ways to add mobility to the coordination medium by introducing the concept of federation. We use federation and normal OO referencing to distinguish different kinds of mobility in coordination media. After clarifying our view on coordination media, we describe and discuss a Meta-Object Protocol (MOP) that fulfils a set of requirements for making these coordination media reprogrammable. Next, we show how the different “flavours” of mobility can be introduced. We implemented all this on our object space prototype, COPS .