SMART mobile agent facility

With ever growing use of Internet for electronic commerce and data mining type applications there seems to be a need for new network computing paradigms that can overcome the barriers posed by network congestion and unreliability. Mobile agent programming is a paradigm that enables the programs to move from one host to another, do the processing locally and return results asynchronously. In this paper, we present the design and development of a mobile agent system that will provide a platform for developing mobile applications that are Mobile Agent Facility (MAF) speci®cation compliant. We start by exploring mobile agent technology and establish its merits with respect to the client±server technology. Next, we introduce a concept called dynamic aggregation to improve the performance of mobile agent applications. We, then focus on the design and implementation issues of our system, Scalable, Mobile and Reliable Technology (SMART), which is based on the MAF speci®cation. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.