Adaptive Mobile Agents: Modeling and a Case Study

Mobile agents have been proposed as a novel and useful paradigm for designing distributed applications. Mobile agent based distributed applications are specially suited for mobile computing environments involving different types of devices because of better bandwidth conservation, support for disconnected operations, easier device/user-specific customization etc. As a mobile agent migrates from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network, the environment in which it operates changes and it may encounter unexpected events like faults etc. The ability to adapt to dynamic environment and unexpected events is a key issue for mobile agents. In this paper, we first present a model of adaptive mobile agents. We then discuss the implementation of a task execution system based on adaptive mobile agents and present results to show that adaptation can be very useful for mobile agent based distributed applications.