Addressing the Question of Platform Extensibility in Mobile Agent Systems

Authors

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a huge proliferation of mobile agent platforms, for the most different application domains. Although these platforms normally have a very interesting set of features, one common limitation found on most architectures is the lack of support for extensibility, i.e. the ability to add new features at runtime, after the platform has been written and deployed. This is an important question since it limits the usability of the platforms across application domains, and its future usefulness as software requirements change. In this paper, we present a general mechanism for platform extensibility based on binary software components. The mechanism was implemented using the JavaBeans component model and several services where implemented and deployed. The approach undertaken is generic and can be easily adapted into existing mobile agent platforms.

Subject

Mobile Agents