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Mobile Agents

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

  • 118 Accesses

D efinition of the Subject

Mobile agents areprograms t hat, with varying degrees of autonomy, can move between hosts across a network. Mobile agents combine the notionsof mobile code, mobile computation, and mobile state. They are location aware and can move to new network locations through explicit mobility operations.Mobile agents realize the notion of moving the computation to the data as opposed to moving the data to the computation, which is an important paradigmfor distributed computing. Mobile agents are effective in operating in networks that tend to disconnect, have low bandwidth, or high latency.

Introduction

Advances in computer communications and computing power have changed the landscape of computing: computing devices ranging from the smallestembedded sensors to the largest servers are routinely interconnected and must interoperate. Their connections often are set up over untrusted anduntrustworthy networks, with limited connectivity and dynamic topologies. The...

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Acknowledgments

Portions of this chapter were initially written for the Information Technology Assessment Consortium(ITAC) at the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) as part of a report entitled Software Agents for the Warfighter, sponsored by NASAand DARPA, and edited by Jeffrey Bradshaw at IHMC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, USA

    Niranjan Suri

  2. Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

    Jan Vitek

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  1. Niranjan Suri
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  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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Suri, N., Vitek, J. (2009). Mobile Agents . In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_333

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