A mobile agent infrastructure for terminal, user, and resource mobility

The telecommunication and the Internet scenarios have pointed out the possibility of accessing resources and services while moving in open distributed global systems. Mobility should allow users to access services and to maintain their preferred working environment independently of their current point of attachment, and has motivated the investigation of new models and solutions. The mobile agent technology is intrinsically suitable to describe, model and implement mobility. The paper describes how a mobile agent framework, called SOMA, can provide an infrastructure to support not only the traditional concepts of terminal and user mobility but also the mobility of resources in general. SOMA permits terminal mobility by introducing the mobile place abstraction that represents a mobile host for agent execution, and user mobility by supporting the virtual home environment service. SOMA supports resource mobility via the resource discovery service that can preserve client/server relationships among SOMA resources and users independently of current positions. The paper also gives experimental results about the costs associated with the main mechanisms for supporting terminal, user, and resource mobility.