Network awareness and mobile agent systems

Most current computer applications are insensitive to changing network conditions. With the growing demand for wireless, satellite, and other highly volatile computer communications networks, however, applications that are robust in the presence of network volatility must be designed and built. Network-robust applications are of great interest in military situations today, and we expect that interest to grow in industrial and eventually consumer environments as well. Mobile agents are one way to realize such applications, especially when used in a wireless environment. This article discusses issues and results related to the problem of making computer applications network-aware and reactive to changing network conditions. It contains a short overview of our work on mobile agents as well as a tutorial on network sensing from the agent perspective. Some prototypes of network sensing systems and network aware mobile-agent applications are presented.