An embeddable mobile agent platform supporting runtime code mobility, interaction and coordination of mobile agents and host systems

Agent technology is emerging as an important concept for the development of distributed complex systems. A number of mobile agent systems have been developed in the last decade. However, most of them were developed to support only Java mobile agents. In order to provide distributed applications with code mobility, this article presents a library, the Mobile-C library, that allows a mobile agent platform, MobileC, to be embeddable in an application to support mobile C/C++ codes carried by mobile agents. Mobile-C uses a C/C++ interpreter as its Agent Execution Engine (AEE). Through the Mobile-C library, Mobile-C can be embedded into an application to support mobile C/C++ codes carried by mobile agents. Using mobile C/C++ codes, it is easy to interface a variety of low-level hardware devices and legacy systems. Through the Mobile-C library, Mobile-C can run on heterogeneous platforms with various operating systems. The Mobile-C library has a small footprint to meet the stringent memory capacity for applications in mechatronic and embedded systems. The Mobile-C library contains different categories of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in both binary and agent spaces to facilitate the design of mobile agent based applications. In addition, a rich set of existing APIs for the C/C++ interpreter employed as the AEE allows an application to have complete information and control over the mobile C/C++ codes residing in Mobile-C. With the synchronization mechanism provided by the Mobile-C library for both binary and agent spaces, simultaneous processes across both spaces can be coordinated to get correct runtime order and avoid unexpected race condition. The study of performance comparisons indicates that Mobile-C is about two times faster than JADE in agent migration. The application of the Mobile-C library is illustrated by dynamic runtime control of a mobile robot’s behavior using mobile agents. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.