Improving Aglets with Strong Agent Mobility through the IBM JikesRVM

— Agents are problem-solving entities that, thanks to characteristics such as autonomy, reactivity, proactivity and sociality, together with mobility, can be used to develop complex and distributed systems. In particular, mobility enables agents to migrate among several hosts, becoming active entities of networks. Java is today one of the most exploited languages to build mobile agent systems, thanks to its object-oriented support, portability and network facilities. Nevertheless, Java does not support strong mobility, i.e., the mobility of threads along with their execution state; thus developers cannot develop agents as real mobile entities. This paper reports our approach for Java thread strong migration, based on the IBM Jikes Research Virtual Machine, presenting our results and proposing an enrichment of the Aglets mobile agent platform in order to exploit strong agent mobility.