International Journal of Advancements in Technology
Open Access

Abstract

A Comparison of Communication Protocols for Mobile Agents

Charu Virmani

Mobile agent is a software program that migrates from one node to another while performing given tasks on behalf of a user. Mobile agent technology is used to develop many distributed applications. A mobile agent can communicate independently with other agents, with users, and with the hosts in the network and preserves all of its state when it moves from one network node to another. However, the mobility of agents makes it more difficult to trace mobile agents and transfer messages reliably. Therefore, a reliable communication protocol that provides efficient location management and reliable message delivery is the key issue to the design of mobile agent system. Several communication protocols exists in a mobile agent communication environment, however an analytical study indicated that some problems remain unsolved and none have proved to be the best. This paper aims to present a comparison of various protocols with the intention to propose a hybrid version in future.