Implementation of Strong Mobility for Multi-Threaded Agents in Java

Strong mobility, which allows an external thread to transparently migrate an agent at any time, is difficult to implement in Java since the Java Virtual Machine does not allow serializing the runtime stack. We give an overview of our implementation strategy for strong mobility in which each agent thread maintains its own serializable execution state at all times. We explain how to solve the synchronization problems involved in migrating a multi-threaded agent and how to terminate the underlying Java threads in the originating virtual machine. We present experimental results that indicate that our implementation approach will be feasible in practice.