Location management & message delivery protocol in multi-region mobile agent computing environment

Location management and message delivery protocol is fundamental to the further development of mobile agent systems in a multiregion mobile agent computing environment in order to control mobile agents and guarantee message delivery between them. However, previous works have some problems when they are applied to a multiregion mobile agent computing environment. First, the cost of location management and message delivery is increased relatively. Second, a following problem arises. Finally, cloned mobile agents and parent & child mobile agents don't get dealt with respect to location management and message delivery. We present a HB (home-blackboard) protocol which is a new location management and message delivery protocol for mobile agents in a multiregion mobile agent computing environment. We have implemented the HB protocol. The HB protocol decreases the cost of location management and message delivery and solves the following problem with low communication cost. In addition, the HB protocol deals with the location management and message delivery of cloned and parent & child mobile agents, so that it guarantees message delivery of these mobile agents.