imAgent: Un Soporte para la Simulación de Sistemas de Agentes Móviles Sobre Ns

In the last years, the mobile agents paradigm has received significant attention in the research community. This activity has been crystallized in the development of a variety of mobile agent systems and works of normalization which will allow the development of commercial systems. Nevertheless, in this aspect the expected deployment of such systems has still not been achieved. It is argued that this situation takes place mainly by the lack of quantitative results that stimulate developers to adopt this technology. In spite of the significant activity of investigation related to mobile agent systems, an evaluation of the technology through real measurements in great-scale scenarios has not considered, mainly in reference to the basic support mechanisms of those systems. This mainly takes place by the difficulty to evaluate solutions on great-scale scenarios; these evaluations allow to verify fast and reliably the viability of the solution. This article presents a support of simulation for mobile agent systems developed to solve the mentioned problem. The aim of this work is to make possible the fast implementation of prototype applications of mobile agent systems, enabling its simulation and easy obtaining of results. This work is based on Network Simulator 2 (Ns 2), a simulation platform that has high functionality and versatility. Ns is widely used in the scientific community to evaluate different protocols. Ns is being developed at Berkeley University.