Location Monitoring In Mobile Agents System: A Survey

Mobile agent technology is emerging as a new paradigm in the area of distributed and mobile computing. Mobile agents play an important role in the development of active and dynamically managed networks and distributed systems. Mobile agents are the intelligent programs that act autonomously on behalf of a user and can migrate from one host to another host in a network in order to satisfy the requests made by their clients. In any mobile agent system, the ability to communicate with agents in real-time, as agents move from one node to another, is essential for retrieving any data or information that they have collected, and for supporting coordination and cooperation among them. So the critical problem in managing a mobile agent system is to track the location of the agents. Communication with a mobile agent incorporates the ability to locate it. Thus locating agents efficiently is the issue central to any mobile agent system. This paper surveys various mobile agent location monitoring techniques, proposed by various authors.