MOBILE SOFTWARE AGENTS - AN OVERVIEW

The anticipated increase in popular use of the Internet will create mo re opportunities in distance learning, electronic commerce, and multim edia communication, but it will also create more challenges in organiz ing information and facilitating its efficient retrieval. From the net work perspective, there will be additional challenges and problems in meeting bandwidth requirements and network management. Many researcher s believed that the mobile agent paradigm (mobile object) could propos e several attractive solutions to deal with such challenges and proble ms. A number of mobile agent systems have been designed and implemente d in academic institutions and commercial firms. However, few applicat ions were found to take advantage of the mobile agent. Among the hurdl es facing this emerging paradigm are concerns about security requireme nts and efficient resource management. This article introduces the cor e concepts of this emerging paradigm, and attempts to present an accou nt of current research efforts in the context of telecommunications. T he goal is to provide the interested reader with a clear background of the opportunities and challenges this emerging paradigm brings about, and a descriptive look at some of the forerunners that are providing experimental technologies supporting this paradigm.