The Effects of Mobile Agent Performance on Mp3 Streaming Applications

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.

Network computing is changing rapidly these days. The mobile agent technology invented to overcome the complexity resulting due to the increasing size of network components rises new network management schemes. Many prototype applications providing mobile agent capability have been proposed for being used in network management. E-commerce and information retrieval are some of them. The motive behind the agent mobility is that, it addresses some limitations faced by traditional centralized client-server architecture, which are mainly, minimizing bandwidth consumption, supporting network load balancing, enhancing scalability as well as flexibility, increase fault tolerance and solve problems caused by unreliable network connections. However, despite its benefits, mobile agent systems still pose security threats. In this paper we propose a mobile agent architecture that supports flexible and reliable interaction of autonomous components in a distributive network environment. We present a management scheme in a hierarchical level that provides to a user with a reliable and flexible global access to Internet/network information services. We further describe a protection mechanism to both agents and their hosting sites of execution called agent servers

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.

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.

In this paper we describe a distributed and dynamic architecture for network management of a heterogeneous distributed system which we have implemented in order to perform network management of our local distributed system. The architecture is highly generic in nature and can be extended to a large heterogeneous network. The architecture is distributed in nature as it provides for multiple managers acting simultaneously. It is rendered dynamic by the utilization of mobile agents for the implementation of network management functionalities. The network managers in our architecture utilize client-server technology and/or mobile agent technology as and when required depending on the functionality implemented and their location. In this context we have implemented a Mobile Network Manager (MNM) which is a location independent network manager. Mobile agents are furnished by MAGENTA (Mobile AGENT environment for distributed Applications) which we have implemented for this purpose.

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.

As cooperative information systems (CIS) grow to cover large-scaled CIS that involves many cooperative sub-systems distributed geographically, management technologies that support them gain in importance. This paper focuses on the underlying technologies that are key to the success of cooperative information system, i.e., service management and network management, which are in the form of middleware, to assure inter-domain cooperation within a big CIS in a flexible, automated and secure way. This flexibility and automation is guaranteed by the use of Policy-based Network Management integrated with Mobile Agent Technology. Extending the mobile agent supporting environment, Grasshopper, to support more secure facilities, largely enhances the security. As a case study, IP Virtual Private Network tunnel between two geographically separated domains within a large-scaled CIS is set up and configured automatically and securely using the service and network management middleware, which shows that service and network management enhanced CIS can operate with more flexibility, automation, security and in a larger information system.KeywordsMobile AgentNetwork ManagementInternet Engineer Task ForcePolicy Decision PointSecure Socket LayerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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.

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).

 Abstract—Current Network Management paradigms are rigid and lack flexibility. Therefore, a new kind of management system and strategy must be provided to enhance the reliability and performance of Network Management. This paper presents the results of our work on Mobile Agent technology as a new paradigm for developing Network Management applications. Problems existing in traditional Network Management are discussed and a distributed solution is proposed. In this new approach, Mobile agents are the lead characters, in a world where networks grow in a larger and complicated way. Finally, we present the results from an implemented architecture for a real network scenario. Our efforts resulted in IMANetMS, an Intelligent Mobile Agent Network Management System.

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.

CORBA and mobile agents are two popular network management technologies. This research investigates these two technologies and some existing integrated approaches thoroughly. Based on this investigation, a novel network management model is proposed, which provides a comprehensive, efficient approach to network management, by integrating CORBA and mobile agents technologies into a unified model and pertaining the advantages of each of the technologies. The result of the experiment showed that the performance of network management can be significantly improved.

The technology of mobile agents has proven its usefulness for system and network management. In order to be effective, the integration of SNMP-based operations and the use of mobility should be effective. This paper presents a step forwards such an integration, by designing and implementing itineraries of mixed destination types: (1) a destination type that represents a location where a mobile agent migrates (for reaching a remote network for performance purposes, or/and for managing the location using a pure Java function); (2) a destination type that represents a location onto which the agent is not able to migrate, but for which an SNMP-based operation must be executed through a classical client-server interaction. The mixed usage of both kinds of destinations is unified within our solution, and as such greatly simplifies the programming of new system and network management operations.KeywordsMobile AgentNetwork ManagementActive ObjectDestination TypeMobile Agent SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Currently, mobile agent technology is the topic of numerous projects, performed by research institutes or industrial companies, and dealing with the development of agent based application or the realization of underlying platforms. Several suitable application areas have been identified up to now, among others dealing with the management of current networks or “traditional” services. However, little effort has been spent up to now regarding the management of a distributed agent environment itself, i.e. regarding the mobile agents themselves as resources to be managed. This must be regarded as an important task which cannot be sufficiently handled by today’s management solutions. This paper describes the concepts of a service management system for mobile agent based services, also referred to as agent management system. The approach described in this paper is partly based on OSI Systems Management concepts which are modified in order to fulfil the new requirements associated with the mobile agent paradigm. At present, this approach is validated in the context of the European research project MARINE.KeywordsMobile AgentService AgentService InstanceAgent PlatformCommon Object Request Broker ArchitectureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.