Transportable agents support worldwide applications

ABSTRACT

Worldwide applications exist in an environment that is inherently distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, insecure, unreliable, and unpredictable. In particular, the latency and bandwidth of network connections varies tremendously from place to place and time to time, particularly when considering wireless networks, mobile devices, and satellite connections. Applications in this environment must be able to adapt to different and changing conditions. We believe that transportable autonomous agents provide an excellent mechanism for the construction of such applications. We describe our prototype transportable-agent system and several applications.

REFERENCES

• Age94: Doug Riecken, Intelligent agents, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.18-21, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176790]
• ATLLW96: Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai , Geoff Langdale , Steven Lucco , Robert Wahbe, Efficient and language-independent mobile programs, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1996 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.127-136, May 21-24, 1996, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• BN84: Andrew D. Birrell , Bruce Jay Nelson, Implementing remote procedure calls, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.2 n.1, p.39-59, February 1984 [doi>10.1145/2080.357392]
• BP88: A. Borr, High performance SQL through low-level system integration, Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.342-349, June 01-03, 1988, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• BR95: N. S. Borenstein and M. Rose. Safe Tcl. Available at ftp://f t p , fv. com/pub/code/other/safe-tcl, tar. Z, 1995.
• CGH+95: David Chess, Benjamin Grosof, Colin Harrison, David Levine, Colin Parris, and Gene Tsudik. Itinerant agents for mobile computing. Technical Report RC 20010, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, March 1995. Revised October 17, 1995.
• Coe94: Michael D. Coen. SodaBot: A software agent environment and construction system. In Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, editors, Proceedings of the CIKM Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Gaithersburg, Maryland, December 1994.
• Fal87: Joseph R. Falcone, A programmable interface language for heterogeneous distributed systems, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.5 n.4, p.330-351, Nov. 1987 [doi>10.1145/29868.29870]
• Gil96: Mark Giles. Navigation for transportable agents. Senior Honors Thesis, Dartmouth College Computer Science, June 1996.
• GKCR96: Robert Gray, David Kotz, George Cybenko, and Daniela Rus. Agent Tcl. In William Cockayne and Michael Zyda, editors, Itinerant Agents: Explanations and Examples with CD-ROM. Manning Publishing, 1996. Imprints by Manning Publishing and Prentice-Hall. To appear in late 1996.
• GKN+96: Robert S. Gray , David Kotz , Saurab Nog , Daniela Rus , George Cybenko, Mobile agents for mobile computing, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 1996
• GM94: James Gosling and Henry McGilton. The Java language: A white paper. Sun Microsystems, 1994.
• Gra95: Robert S. Gray. Agent Tcl: A transportable agent system. In Proceedings of the CIKM Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Fourth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 95}, Baltimore, Maryland, December 1995.
• Gra96: Robert S. Gray. Agent Tch A flexible and secure mobile-agent system. In Proceedings of the 1996 Tcl/Tk Workshop, July 1996.
• HH95: L. B. Huston and P. Honeyman. Partially connected operation. Computing Systems, 8(4):365- 379, Fall 1995.
• JdT+95: A. D. Joseph , A. F. de Lespinasse , J. A. Tauber , D. K. Gifford , M. F. Kaashoek, Rover: a toolkit for mobile information access, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.156-171, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• Joh95: David B. Johnson, Scalable support for transparent mobile host internetworking, Wireless Networks, v.1 n.3, p.311-321, 1995 [doi>10.1007/BF01200849]
• JvS95: D. Johansen , R. van Renesse , F. B. Schneider, Operating system support for mobile agents, Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-V), p.42, May 04-05, 1995
• KS92: James J. Kistler , M. Satyanarayanan, Disconnected operation in the Coda File System, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.10 n.1, p.3-25, Feb. 1992 [doi>10.1145/146941.146942]
• LO95: Jacob Y. Levy and John K. Ousterhout. A Safe Tel toolkit for electronic meeting places. In Proceedings of the First USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce, pages133-135, July 1995.
• MES95: L. B. Mummert , M. R. Ebling , M. Satyanarayanan, Exploiting weak connectivity for mobile file access, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.143-155, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• NCK96: Saurab Nog , Sumit Chawla , David Kotz, An RPC Mechanism for Transportable Agents, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 1996
• NPS95: Brian B. Noble, Morgan Price, and M. Satyanarayanan. A programming interface for application-aware adaptation in mobile computing. Computing Systems, 8(4):345-363, Fall 1995.
• Ous94: John K. Ousterhout, Tcl and the Tk toolkit, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1994
• Pei96: Holger Paine. The ARA project. WWW page http://~ww.uai-kl.edu/AG-Nelmer/Ara, Distributed Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserlautern, 1996.
• RGK96: Daniela Rus, Robert Gray, and David Kotz. Autonomous and adaptive agents that gather information. In AAAI '96 International Workshop on Intelligent Adaptive Agents, August 1996. To appear.
• RHR+94: Peter Rather, John Heidemann, David Ratner, Greg Skinner, and Gerald Popek. Resolving file conflicts in the Ficus file system. In Proceedings of the 1994 Summer USENIX Conference, pages 183-195, 1994.
• SG90: James W. Stamos , David K. Gifford, Remote evaluation, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.12 n.4, p.537-564, Oct. 1990 [doi>10.1145/88616.88631]
• Sto94: Alexander D. Stoyenko, SUPRA-RPC: SUbprogram PaRAmeters in remote procedure calls, Software—Practice & Experience, v.24 n.1, p.27-49, Jan. 1994 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380240103]
• TLKC95: Bent Thomsen, Lone Leth, Frederick Knabe, and Pierre-Yves Chevalier. Mobile agents. ECRC external report, European Computer-Industry Research Centre, 1995.
• TTP+95: D. B. Terry , M. M. Theimer , Karin Petersen , A. J. Demers , M. J. Spreitzer , C. H. Hauser, Managing update conflicts in Bayou, a weakly connected replicated storage system, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.172-182, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• Whi94: Computer Staff, Mobile Agents Make a Network an Open Platform for Third-Party Developers, Computer, v.27 n.11, p.89-90, November 1994 [doi>10.1109/2.330076]