Messengers: Distributed Programming Using Mobile Agents
Munehiro Fukuda, Lubomir Bic, Michael B. Dillencourt, Fehmina Merchant · 2001
this paper we present and explore a new programming paradigm for distributed systems, which differs from those mentioned above in its basic philosophy. The main concept is mobile agents, which are self-contained autonomous programs that have their own identity and behavior. Mobile agents can navigate through the underlying computational network, perform various tasks at the nodes they visit, and coordinate their activities with other agents participating in the distributed computation. We have developed a mobile agent system, called MESSENGERS, which we will use to illustrate concepts underlying generalpurpose distributed programming using mobile agents. The mobile agents in the MESSENGERS system are referred to as Messengers (Bic, 1995; Bic, et al., 1996; Fukuda, et al., 1999; Fukuda, et al., 1998; Fukuda, et al. 1997)