Naming and locating mobile agents in an Internet environment

The problem of finding the position of a mobile agent in a wide distributed system still represents an open research area. In fact, although today several mobile agent platforms have been developed, each of them implements an ad hoc naming and location policy, suitably studied to address the specific requirements deriving from the design choices made. What is really needed is a naming and location scheme of general validity, able to effectively meet all the typical requirements of mobile agent environments and thus easy to integrate into different platforms. A first contribution of the paper is the identification of the main requirements which an agent naming scheme of general validity should meet. Then, some properties are suggested to be taken into account, in order to make a qualitative naming scheme classification. The second contribution of the paper is the proposal of a "human readable" agent naming scheme, based on the distributed environment outlined in MASIF, the standardization OMG proposal for mobile agent systems. In addition, two location protocols suitable for the proposed naming scheme are presented, which are particularly appropriate for Internet/intranet environments.