Ackn Owlegemen Ts Table of Con Ten Ts

New models for education dissemination have emerged with the growth of distributed systems, especially with the widespread penetration of Internet. This has made possible imparting education on a larger scale. Distance evaluation of students constitutes a crucial factor for success of Distance Education initiatives. Such large distributed systems also raise number of challenges in terms of design, technologies and their implementations. Most of the present day systems have client-server architectures. The client-server model though powerful, has scalability limitations for distance evaluation systems. Over the past few years the mobile agent paradigm, which has emerged as a new approach for structuring distributed applications, attempts to address many of these concerns. In this project, we survey the existing mobile agent frameworks to understand state of the art. We then use the mobile agent approach for designing, implementing and deploying a system for distance evaluation of students. We consider the entire examination process: (i) papersetting, where the examiners spread over the internet collaborate to produce a question paper, (ii) examination conduction, where the question papers are distributed and the answer papers are collected, and (iii) answer-paper evaluation, result compilation and publishing. In this report we detail our design, implementation and experimentations. We conclude by presenting our observations and experiences of using mobile agents for designing large distributed systems. We also list some of the challenges that still need to be tackled and indicate the future directions of our work.