A hierarchical mapping scheme for mobile agent systems

MESSENGERS is a system for general-purpose distributed computing based on the principles of mobile agents. Its underlying infrastructure consists of a collection of daemon processes, whose task it is to receive incoming agents, provide the necessary environment for their execution, and send them on to their next destinations as dictated by their behaviors. The structure of the daemon processes and their mapping onto the physical network is the main subject of this paper. Given the autonomous nature of each computation, the mapping problem is very different from those implemented for systems of communicating processes. At the same time, it offers new opportunities for solving the problems of load balancing, dynamic resource utilization, and trade-offs between computation granularity and communication overhead.