SMART mobile agent facility

With ever growing use of Internet for electronic commerce and data mining t ype applications there seems to be a need for new network computing paradig ms that can overcome the barriers posed by network congestion and unreliabi lity. Mobile agent programming is a paradigm that enables the programs to m ove from one host to another, do the processing locally and return results asynchronously. In this paper, we present the design and development of a m obile agent system that will provide a platform for developing mobile appli cations that are Mobile Agent Facility (MAF) specification compliant. We st art by exploring mobile agent technology and establish its merits with resp ect to the client-server technology. Next, we introduce a concept called dy namic aggregation to improve the performance of mobile agent applications. We, then focus on the design and implementation issues of our system, Scala ble, Mobile and Reliable Technology (SMART), which is based on the MAF spec ification. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.