In computer science, a mobile agent is a composition of computer software and data which is able to migrate (move) from one computer to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer. Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... The NASA Columbia Supercomputer. ...

Definition and overview

Mobile Agent, namely, is a type of software agent, with the feature of autonomy, social ability, learning, and most important, mobility. In computer science, a software agent is an abstraction, a logical model that describes software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency. ...

When the term mobile agent is used, it refers to a process that can transport its state from one environment to another, with its data intact, and still being able to perform appropriately in the new environment. Mobile agents decide when and where to move next, which is evolved from RPC. So how exactly does a mobile agent move? Just like a user doesn't really visit a website but only make a copy of it, a mobile agent accomplishes this move through data duplication. When a mobile agent decides to move, it saves its own state and transports this saved state to next host and resume execution from the saved state. In computing, a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. ... Remote procedure call (RPC) is a protocol that allows a computer program running on one computer to cause a subroutine on another computer to be executed without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this interaction. ... In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of saving an object onto a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or to transmit it across a network connection link, either in binary form, or in some human-readable text...

Mobile agents are a specific form of mobile code and software agents paradigms. However, in contrast to the Remote evaluation and Code on demand paradigms, mobile agents are active in that they may choose to migrate between computers at any time during their execution. This makes them a powerful tool for implementing distributed applications in a computer network. In computer science, mobile code is a general term for any executable software program that is sent via some computer network from one computer to another to be executed at the destination. ... In computer science, a software agent is an abstraction, a logical model that describes software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency. ... In computer science, remote evaluation is a general term for any technology that involves the transmission of executable software programs from a client computer to a server computer for subsequent exection at the server. ... In computing, code on demand is a general term for any technology that sends executable software programs from a server computer to a client computer upon request from the clients software (e. ... This article or section should be merged with Distributed computing In computer science, a distributed system is an application that consists of components running on different computers concurrently. ... “Computer Networks” redirects here. ...

Advantages

Some advantages which mobile agents have over conventional agents:

• Move computation to data, reducing network load.
• Asynchronous execution on multiple heterogeneous network hosts
• Dynamic adaptation - actions are dependent on the state of the host environment
• Tolerant to network faults - able to operate without an active connection between client and server
• Flexible maintenance - to change an agent's actions, only the source (rather than the computation hosts) must be updated

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Application of mobile agents

Common applications include:

• Resource availability, discovery, monitoring
• Information retrieval can be used in fetching the system information to and fro in client server paradigm

system information

• Network management, by using mobile agents we can monitor the throughput of remote machine in terms of network parameters
• copying file in server client paradigm or can be used in taking back up of data from remote machines

making backup

• Dynamic software deployment -can increase protability ,making system requirements a less influential

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See also

• Java Aglets

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External links

• Seven Good Reasons for Mobile Agents
• Mobile Agent Technologies, developer of AgentOS agent based operating system. Inventor of Automatic Thread Migration (ATM).
• National Institute for Standards and Technology, hosts a center for investigating security of mobile agents.
• Secure Mobile Agents (SeMoA), an open source mobile agent system with extensive support for cryptographic protection of mobile agents.