In order for mobile agents to be accepted as a basic technology for enabling electronic commerce, proper security mechanisms must be developed. Hosts must be protected from malicious agents, agents must be protected from other agents and also agents must be protected from malicious hosts. For solving the first three problems, existing technology from operating systems and distributed systems re...

Mobile agents are software which moves autonomously through a computer network with aim to perform some computation or gather information on behalf of its creator or an application. In the last several years, mobile agents have proved their numerous applications including e-commerce, telecommunication systems, information management, on-line auctions or service brokering. In most applications, ...

One of the most promising approaches to the design of distributed software is the technique of mobile agents [White96]. A mobile agent is an entity, which is capable to migrate around in a distributed system to fulfill its task instructed by the user. The typical migration entity of a mobile agent is an object of the object-based programming paradigm [Booch94] or a whole group of objects migrat...

in distributed computing environment, Mobile agents are mobile autonomous processes which operate on behalf of users (e.g., the Internet). These applications include a specialized search of a middleware services such as an active mail system, large free-text database, electronic malls for shopping, and updated networking devices. Mobile agent systems use less network bandwidth, increase asynchr...

Security modeling for agents has been one of the most challenging issues in developing practical mobile agent software systems. In the past, researchers have developed mobile agent systems with emphasis either on protecting mobile agents from malicious hosts or protecting hosts from malicious agents. In this paper, we propose a security based mobile agent system architecture that provides a gen...

Network management applications using mobile agents require secure techniques for the lifecycle of the mobile agent, from both mobile agent and host points of view. Based on the analysis of the security threats that may occur during the mobile agent based network management applications, this paper presents Mobile Agent Security Facility (MASF). MASF has several key features: 1) a secure mechan...

This paper presents a new framework for constructing mobile agents. The framework introduces the notion of agent hierarchy and inter-agent migration and thus allows a group of mobile agents to be dynamically assembled into a single mobile agent. It provides a powerful method to construct a distributed application, in particular a large-scale mobile application. To demonstrate how to exploit our...

Mobile agent technologies are getting popular as means for an efficient way to access network resources. Because an application using mobile agents has some unique problems caused by frequent creation, migration and disappearance of mobile agents, a mobile agent platform has to provide not only agents and their execution engines but some functions and mechanisms which are specialized to mobile ...

We study the capacity of sensor networks with mobile agents. We look at the problem from information theory perspective, and optimize various network parameters such as coverage area, flying altitude, and the trajectory of mobile agents. Multiple mobile agents and the possibility of cooperation among them are also considered.

Although mobile agents and peer-to-peer networks have been researched during the last few years, the two technologies in combination have not been widely researched. This paper is a survey addressing question "How to utilize Mobile Agents in peer-to-peer networks". The main goal for the paper is to find applications for the combination of mobile agents and peer-to-peer networks.