Agent-based resource discovery

Presents a distributed discovery method allowing individual nodes to gather information about resources in a wide-area distributed system made up of autonomous systems linked together by a network technology substrate. We introduce an algorithm and a model for distributed awareness and a framework for the dynamic assembly of agents monitoring network resources. Whenever an agent needs detailed information about the individual components of another system, it uses the information gathered by the distributed awareness mechanism to identify the target system, then creates a description of a monitoring agent that is capable of providing the information about remote resources, and sends this description to the remote site. There, an agent factory dynamically assembles the monitoring agent. This solution is scalable and is suitable for heterogeneous environments where the architecture and the hardware resources of individual nodes differ, where the services provided by the system are diverse, and where the bandwidth and latency of the communication links cover a broad range.