Efficient algorithms to find optimal agent migration strategies

Abstract Mobile agent technology has received a rapidly growing attention over the last few years. A number of mobile agent systems are under development in academic as well as industrial environments, there are already various moves to popularize and standardize mobile agent facilities and architectures. It has been argued that mobile agents provide certain advantages as compared to traditional approaches in terms of providing facilities like software-distribution on demand at reduced communication costs, better support for asynchronous tasks, and scalibility due to dynamic deployment which is based on a taxonomy of mobility. The employment of mobile agents has been particularly attractive in applications like information retrieval in widely distributed heterogeneous environments, network management, electronic commerce and in mobile computing. Inspite of all this growing interest and efforts the agent technology is in a fairly early stage and a number of technical problems should be solved in order to make this new technology a commercial success. These open problems include mechenisms for agent security, control structures, transactional support, and design of communication models. In this paper we extend previous research conducted on mobile agents regarding their communication performance models. It has been indicated that the optimal performance of an agent is achieved by a critical sequence of mixed remote procedure calls and agent migration. We provide here exact algorithms to solve various variants of this problem under certain restrictions on the sequence of interactions of the mobile agents.