Mobile software agents: an overview

The anticipated increase in popular use of the Internet will create more opportunities in distance learning, electronic commerce, and multimedia communication, but it will also create more challenges in organizing information and facilitating its efficient retrieval. From the network perspective, there will be additional challenges and problems in meeting bandwidth requirements and network management. Many researchers believed that the mobile agent paradigm (mobile object) could propose several attractive solutions to deal with such challenges and problems. A number of mobile agent systems have been designed and implemented in academic institutions and commercial firms. However, few applications were found to take advantage of the mobile agent. Among the hurdles facing this emerging paradigm are concerns about security requirements and efficient resource management. This article introduces the core concepts of this emerging paradigm, and presents an account of current research efforts in the context of telecommunications. The goal is to provide the interested reader with a clear background of the opportunities and challenges this emerging paradigm brings about, and a descriptive look at some of the forerunners that are providing experimental technologies supporting this paradigm.