A survey on mobile agent communication protocols

An agent is a self decision making software entity which acts on behalf of the user. A mobile agent roams the internet in order to access different services. To attain large goals different agents work and communicate together in order to achieve goal efficiently. Reliable communication between multi mobile agents is still a challenge. For reliable communication, sender must know the receiver's current location in order to deliver the message. Mobile agent's location management consists of two phases. First one is tracking phase and other is message delivery phase, both of these phases have their own overheads. Agent communication failure can occur due to the triangle problem or message chase problem. The message chase problem arises in highly mobile agents. Due to the message chase problem, a message may never be delivered. To deliver the message to agent in a timely and reliable manner is one of the challenging issues in multi mobile agent environments. In this paper, we discuss and analyze existing location management schemes. The existing approaches lever up the overhead in first phase but trim down the overhead in second phase or vice versa. The overhead could be in the form of number of location update messages, memory or delay.