TABLE OF CONTENTS Jiannong Cao, Alvin T.S.Chan
Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, P.R. China
Daoxu Chen, Jian Lu
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University
Nanjing, Jiangsu, P.R. China
E-mail: csjcao@comp.polyu.edu.hk
Jingyang Zhou,
Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, P.R. China
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University
Nanjing, Jiangsu, P.R. China
E-mail: csjcao@comp.polyu.edu.hk
Agents of various species have been an active field of research and development for a decade now. Mobile agent technology that allows programs to move autonomously through a network has emerged as a new approach to distributed computing. It supports a unified and scalable framework for various kinds of applications such as electronic commerce, parallel computing, and information retrieval, as well as for advanced technologies such as Web Services and Grid Computing operating in widely distributed heterogeneous open networks including the Internet. This chapter introduces some basic concepts related to mobile agents, provides an overview of mobile agent technology and its applications in Internet computing, discusses, and surveys some current mobile agent systems.
In today s interconnected society, users are confronted with an often overwhelming abundance of information. To more efficiently utilize this data, three types of network computing paradigms have been proposed [Lange and Oshima (1998)], the Client-Server Paradigm (such as COBRA), the Code-on-Demand Paradigm (such as Applet) and the Mobile Agent Paradigm. Of these three, the Mobile Agent paradigm has more distinguished merits and is...
