Dynamically adaptable mobile agents for scaleable software and service management

Abstract

Two hard sub-problems have emerged relating to the use of mobile agents for service management tasks. First, what is their impact on security, and second, how can they receive a flexible capacity to adapt to an open range of different environments on demand, without introducing too stringent prior assumptions. In this paper, we present work towards solving the second problem, which is of particular interest to management software, because it typically needs to excert fine-grained and therefore particular resource control. We suggest a mechanism that reassembles mobile agents from smaller sub-components during arrival at each hop. The process incorporates patterns of unmutable and mutable sub-components, and is informed by the conditions of each local environment. We discuss different kinds of software adaptation and draw a distinction between static and continuous forms. Our software prototype for dynamic adaptation provides a concept for exchanging environment-dependent implementations of mobile agents during runtime. Dynamic adaptation enhances efficiency of mobile code in terms of bandwidth usage and scalability.