STRING: Efficient Implementation of Strongly Migrating Mobile Agents in Java

Mobile agents are programs which ship themselves from one machine to another, at programmer defined points. Agents which move between machines, with their execution states, are said to perform strong migration. Such agents form an interesting paradigm for developing distributed applications. The key issue in strong migration is the transmission of execution states of agents. We propose STRING, which is an approach to capture and re-establish the execution state of mobile agents programmed in Java, without any modifications to the Java virtual machine. Our approach instruments the original source code and the resultant byte code to achieve the capture and reestablishment of the execution state of mobile agents at a language level. Though our current prototype implementation of STRING has been used for providing a programming and runtime environment for mobile agents, it can be easily extended for any Java program.