From client/server to mobile agents: an in-depth analysis of the related performance aspects

This paper provides an experimental and analytical evaluation of the client-server, remote evaluation and mobile agent communication paradigms. Our purpose is that of identifying the environmental situations in which such paradigms should be preferred or combined in order to optimize the performances of a distributed system. The scenario selected for the analysis is information retrieval on the WWW. An analytical evaluation throughout the solution of non-Markovian Petri net models is provided.