A Policy-based Mobile Agent Infrastructure

The mobile agent paradigm seems to provide promising solutions for developing applications in the Internet environment. However, the adoption of mobile agents introduces specific problems related to the specification and control of agent migration strategies. The paper advocates a policy-based solution to support the flexible management and dynamic configurability of agent mobility behaviour. Our solution permits to define agent migration strategies at a high level of abstraction, separately from the agent code, thus promoting a clear separation between mobility and computational concerns. The paper describes the policy-based middleware that allows to adapt at run time agent migration strategies to evolving application requirements and environment conditions without impact on the agent code implementation.