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Abstract
Mobile agent systems are a powerful approach to develop
distributed applications since they migrate to hosts on
which they have the resources to execute individual tasks.
Existing mobile agent systems require detailed knowledge
about these hosts at the time of coding. This assumption
is not acceptable in a dynamic environment like a
peer-to-peer network, where hosts and, as a consequence,
also agents become repeatedly connected and disconnected.
To this end, we propose a predicate-based approach
allowing the specification of hosts an agent has to
migrate to. With this highly flexible approach, termed
P2PMobileAgents, we combine the benefits of execution
location transparency with those of code mobility.
Similarly, also the recipients of messages can be specified
by predicates, e.g. for synchronisation purposes.
For providing meta information about agents and hosts
we use XML documents.
You can directly download a postscript (642 KB) version of this paper.
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