Design and Analysis of Mobile Agent Communication Protocols

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Lu Jian, for his guidance and help. It is Prof. Lu who introduces me to the domain of mobile agents and helps me find my way. His moral and financial support, his gentle way of teaching, his generosity and kindness, and his high standards of integrity have been inspirational to me and crucial to the completion of this thesis. I would also like to thank Prof. Cao Jiannong at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who supervised my 6-month research in Hong Kong. Prof. Cao provides remarkable insights into many aspects of my academic and research life. His enthusiasm and wisdom also influence me greatly and teach me a lot. I regard it an honor to have worked with him. All my colleagues in the Institute of Computer Software also play an important role in the completion of this thesis. I owe much to members of the Mogent group. They are Dr. It is always a pleasure to discuss and exchange ideas with them. Their valuable advice helped me achieve much in my study and research. I' m grateful to Ma Xiaoxing, for his useful comments and suggestions. I' m indebt to Cao Chun, Ren Xiaoxin and Lin Xiangyu for their technical support. Sincerely thanks go to all other colleagues at the Institute of Computer Software, for their pleasant companionship in my three-year graduate study and all the happy time we spent together. Finally, I would like to express my special thanks to my family and my girlfriend, Ms. Zhang Xiaokun. It is their love, understanding, and support that enabled me to accomplish this thesis. Abstract Mobile agents are regarded as the future of distributed computing. They are promising to offer a unified and scalable framework for applications in widely distributed heterogeneous Among essential features of mobile agents, communication is a fundamental ability that enables mobile agents to cooperate with each other by sharing and exchanging information and partial results, and collectively making decisions. Although process communication has been a cliché in distributed systems research, the presence of mobility raises a number of new challenges in designing message delivery protocols for effective and efficient communications between mobile agents. In designing such a protocol, two fundamental issues must be addressed: (1) tracking the location of the target mobile agent, and (2) delivering the message reliably to the agent. Many protocols …