A Distributed Algorithm for 0-1 Knapsack Problem Based on Mobile Agent

In this paper, we consider an e-Commerce system that supports buying and selling goods or services over the Internet using Mobile Agent(MA) technologies. MAs are active, autonomous, and self-replicable software objects containing both computational logic and state information. When MA technologies are applied to e-Commerce environments, the MAs can search for a product on behalf of the buyer. The buyer constructs a group of MAs, and dispatches each agent in the group to the supplier sites. Each buyer agent compares price information of goods which are suggested by the suppliers. Eventually, all MAs exchange their price information cooperating to determine the most suitable item. In the selection process, if the price information which is exchanged among the MAs is modified by malicious entities, the user may not select intended goods. In this paper, we propose a group session key generation scheme called PGKA(Partial Group session Key Agreement) for secure communication among the MAs. The PGKA has no sponsors, controllers, or any other members charged with special duties. The main idea in PGKA is to distribute the computation of the group session key generation among the members, which makes the scheme suitable for fully distributed environments. In addition, the cost of the key reconstruction is very low in this scheme, because only the seed value is required to be transmitted for the reconstruction process.

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and their application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work has produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being integrated into commercial products. However, despite the positive results, we feel that mobile agent technology is still not ready to enter the path of mainstream software development. In our perspective, one of the main reasons for this situation arises from the traditional approach to mobile agent technology. This approach, based on the familiar concept of the mobile-agent distributed platform as an extension of the operating system, focuses too much on the mobile agents and associated issues (mobility, agent lifecycle, security, coordination, etc.) and provides poor support for the development of applications where mobile agents are just one of several available technologies. Learning from past experience, we are now working on a new approach where the focus is brought back to the applications and mobile agents become just one the tools available to develop distributed systems. This provides a much lighter framework for application-based mobile agent systems. This paper presents the lessons learned from our previous project and discusses the new concept we are developing: application-centric mobile agent systems.

No doubt, the usages of mobile agent and mobile phone technologies are rapidly increased. The mobile agent has a promising room in the industry area. Unfortunately, this technology faces some security problems from mobile agents and hosts sides. Two of the fundamental issues in designing protocols for message passing between mobile agents (MAs) are tracking the migration of the target agent and forwarding messages to it. Even with an ideal fault-free network-transport mechanism, messages can be dropped during MA migration. Therefore, in order to provide reliable message delivery, protocols need to overcome message loss caused by asynchronous operations of agent migration and message forwarding. As mobile devices and third generation mobile networks have become a reality, location based services are thought to be a major growing area. Mobile devices are given context sensitiveness so that they can be aware of the users/services surrounding physical environment and state. In this paper we propose message forwarding approaches, namely push and pull, are explored to design adaptive and reliable message delivery protocols.Also location aware services scheme by using an agency, which helps in discovering the required services for the mobile users. The agency consists of five agents: Manager Agent (MA), Route Monitoring Agent (RMA), Local Service Management Agent (LSMA), Global Service Management Agent (GSMA) and Area Monitoring Agent (AMA).

There are many areas in which mobile agent technology can be deployed. Researchers are now looking at this technology as a solution in their respective research areas, such as information retrieval, distributed computing, and network management. This increase of interest is due the basic characteristics of mobileagents - autonomous and mobile. In the paper, we are exploiting the abovementioned characteristics of mobile agents, and applying this technology in Internetenvironments. Using a mobile agent as a transparent content transcoding proxy in a proxy based network architecture, we show how a mobile proxy agent can be used to improve quality of service provided to the end user connected via heterogeneous access networks, using computing devices which have very different capabilities.

Nowadays, a lot of e-Learning systems are widely deployed in educational schools. Typical e-Learning systems are implemented as client-server model. In the client-server model, the number of clients affects on the load of the server. In order to reduce the load on the server, we developed a P2P-based distributed e-Learning system. The proposed system consists of a lot of mobile agents which manage study contents and some functions such as scoring, showing questions, and correct answers. When a learner requests content, a mobile agent who has its content comes to the learner's computer, and then he/she can start the study. Here, a mobile agent has to manage multimedia data, which may be a huge size of data. Thus, a mobile agent has to migrates to the learner's node with a huge size of data. Then, the learner cannot start the study until the mobile agent finished to migrate. In order to solve this problem, we divide multimedia data into fragments and prepare mobile agents which manages each fragments. Since each mobile agents become small, a learner can start the study soon without waiting for the migration of a mobile agent which has a huge size of multimedia data. We, however, have to search a mobile agent which manages their fragments. Therefore, a mobile agent which manages n-th fragments informs its location to the agent which manages (n+1)-th fragments, and vice versa. Since each agent knows the location of a mobile agent which manages next and previous fragment, and fragments are cached into learner's node, a learner can play multimedia data smoothly without finding the location of mobile agent which manages holding next fragment. Experiment results show the effectiveness of our method.

Mobile agent technology has been proposed for use on the Internet. The mobile agent is a software program that acts on behalf of a user or software. It has the following features: (1) it is autonomous; (2) it has one or more objectives; (3) it has a scope of competence; and (4) it may, or may not, collaborate and communicate with other software and users. 3 In order to perform its job, it is able to migrate from a source host to a target host on a network under its own control. 4 However, this may lead to a great deal of security threats and attacks. When a mobile agent moves between a series of hosts, it may happen to encounter either trust-worthy or malicious hosts. A mobile agent must be capable of authenticating legal hosts and other agents to avoid malicious attacks. Ideally, a mobile agent should be versatile, robust, and secure in changing environments. Therefore, the security issue when dealing with mobile agents becomes essential. So far, the research on mobile agent security has been focused on the following topics: 5

Now a days mobile agents are commonly used in e-commerce applications. Mobile agent is an independent program that moves around the network to execute the predefined tasks on behalf of user. Stock market can utilize mobile agents for brokering services especially for advisory dealing. Here mobile agent helps the client to make a decision on which share has to bought. Security is the major concern when mobile agents are used. Mobile agents must be protected when it travels from one host to another host. When mobile agent technology is adopted a major type of security issue encountered is colluded truncation attack. The proposed method helps to avoid this type of attack by constructing a routing table. Routing table constructed with trust and reputation value identifies the secure route for migration and cryptographic algorithms are used to protect the gathered information. The cryptographic algorithms achieve security goals like confidentiality and integrity.

Solutions for system and network management given today are afflicted with two main shortcomings, namely the centralised approach they are based on and the inadequate addressing of heterogeneous environments. While the latter is the main concern of, for example, Web-based management activities, the aspect of centralisation is not being covered to full extend. With regard to the explosive growth of computer systems and networks both in size and complexity, new approaches therefore have to be evaluated which address all problems caused by complexity and heterogeneity. Mobile agent technology is being discussed as a promising new technology for various application areas, with management being one of the most promising. In this paper, problems arising when trying to apply this new technology to system and network management are identified and discussed. The focus is on how to handle the overall complexity with mobile agents, which are limited in size, knowledge, and functionality. An architecture is presented which introduces various types of mobile agents. By determining the required correlation sequence and identifying the co-operation of agents, it is shown how an alarm correlation with mobile agents can be established, which forms the basis for addressing management tasks with mobile agent technology.

The growth in the development of distributed manufacturing systems necessitates increases in efficient technologies in order to facilitate management of the networked resources. Systems such as manufacturing automation protocol (MAP) already exist which were specifically designed for managing networked manufacturing devices. However, MAP has been criticised for being over-complex and expensive for small–medium sized enterprises. The simple network management protocol (SNMP) was designed for managing TCP/IP networks, and we argue that it can also be used for managing networked manufacturing devices. However, SNMP, like MAP, is based upon a client/server architecture, and both have scalability issues. We also investigate the use of mobile agent (MA) technology as a means of managing a domain of manufacturing devices. An integrated network management framework based on MA technology is developed to direct the research into the investigation of aligning network management paradigm to the strategic management decision.

The security problem of mobile agent is important for applications using mobile agent technology. In this paper, we analyzed the security problems of mobile agent system exposed in opening environment and proposed a method to improve the authentication and credentials management in mobile agent environment. In our design, the trusted computing platform is used as the basic platform to running mobile agent systems, and the trusted platform module will used to help the authentication and credentials management. We also gave a model system for building trusted mobile agent system. In this system, the security of mobile agent is improved by using trusted computing platform which is linked with upper layer applications through the trusted software stack. Then, trusted services for mobile agent, including authentication, credential management and key storage, are supported.

Mobile agent technology is used in modern information technology to facilitate interoperability between isolated information systems. In addition, mobile agents have many advantages that make them a viable and attractive option in health sector applications. We propose the development of a health architecture based on integrated mobile agent technology and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with distributed health applications involving the interoperability of remote or local homogeneous and heterogeneous applications, besides the SOA, and providing support for mobile agents. Furthermore, the SOA can be tested on different platforms. The development of a mobile agent architecture using Health Level Seven, known as HL7, for data exchange in the health sector is an essential step in making it widely accepted by centers that use health records as their means of communication. Each health center’s local data format can be modified for data exchange with other health centers through a mapping process that transforms the data from its local format to HL7, and vice versa. This research introduces a mobile agent architecture that can be applied to distributed health information systems to achieve interoperability.

Mobile agents have attracted considerable interest in recent years. In the context of mobile agents, fault tolerance is crucial to enable the integration of mobile agent technology into today's business applications. To further develop mobile agent technology, reliability mechanisms such as fault tolerance and transaction support are required. For this purpose, we first identify two basic requirements for fault-tolerant mobile agent execution: (1) non-blocking (i.e., a single failure does not prevent progress of the mobile agent execution); and (2) exactly-once (i.e., multiple executions of the agent are prevented). To achieve fault tolerance for the agent system, especially for the agent transfer to a new host, we use distributed transaction processing. This paper proposes a novel approach to fault-tolerant mobile agent execution, which is based on modeling agent execution as a sequence of agreement problems. Each agreement problem is one instance of the well-understood consensus problem. Our solution does not require a perfect failure detection mechanism, while preventing blocking and ensuring that the agent is executed exactly once

In wireless sensor networks, the mobile agent technology is used in data transmission from one cluster to another cluster. The Optimization of mobile agent in the routing within the clustering algorithm for wireless sensor networks to further reduce the amount of data transfer. the main objectives of wireless sensor network design is to improve the energy efficiency & effective utilization of sensor nodes to prolong the lifespan of a wireless network .This paper presents an effective clustering algorithm, which is an extension to the LEACH routing algorithm., this algorithm fully utilizes the location information of network nodes in routing to reduce the routing cost. Through a clustering approach of intelligent mobile agents, it is possible to reduce the cost of time for each individual agent, here the problem of Multiple Clustering of Mobile Agents (MCCMA) where the decision is to cluster mobile agents such that a group of similar intelligent mobile agents will visit a group of similar sensor nodes are compare with location based clustering algorithm of wsn. both of Simulation results indicate that these algorithm & approach of mobile agent & wireless sensor network Nodes can have balance nodes' energy consumption and prolong the network's life span. It also has good extensibility & stability

Mobile agent technology is a new paradigm of distributed computing that can replace the conventional client-server model. However, it has not become popular due to some problems such as security. The fact that computers have complete control over all the programs makes it very hard to protect mobile agents from untrusted hosts. In this paper we propose a security approach for mobile agents, which protect mobile agents from malicious hosts. Our new approach prevents privacy attacks and integrity attacks to mobile agents from malicious hosts. This approach is an extension of mobile cryptography, as proposed by Sander and Tschudin, and it removes many problems found in the original idea of mobile cryptography while preserving most of the benefits. Although the original idea of mobile cryptography allowed direct computations without decryptions on encrypted mobile agents, it did not provide any practical ways of implementation due to the fact that no homomorphic encryption schemes are found for their approach. Our approach provides a practical idea for implementing mobile cryptography by suggesting a hybrid method that mixes a function composition technique and a homomorphic encryption scheme that we have found. Like the original mobile cryptography, our approach will encrypt both code and data including state information in a way that enables direct computation on encrypted data without decryption.

Since the topology of now network system is always dynamic, the paper provides a network active defense model that is adaptive for dynamic topology based on the mobile agent technology. The model includes three parts: network topology discovery, adaptive agents modulation mechanism and active defense. The model provided by the paper contains two kinds of agents: topology discovery agent and defense one. The model uses mobile network topology discovery agents to actively probe the current network topology and encodes it; then the adaptive modulation part of the model implements the distribution and migration of the defense agents according to the current topology; at last the defense agents then make active defense for the network.