Mobile Intelligence

6.1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, we have witnessed explosive advances in computing technologies leading to the availability of new services to users. At the heart of these advances lies the introduction of networking infrastructures, such as the Internet, to support global computing applications. As a result, a computer is no longer an isolated entity, but instead interacts with other systems to carry out user tasks. With a new outlook on computing applications comes the need to access data and services, which is heterogeneous and distributed, at anytime and from any location. Under these new requirements, both users and the data of interest may be mobile and subsisting in an environment that is characterized by low bandwidth, limited resources, and frequent disconnection. The development of applications in such an environment requires the adoption of novel techniques to deal with the emerging issues and the technological constraints. Mobile agent technology is one of the new mobile computing application design paradigms that have shown great success in this area.

In general, mobile agent technology refers to a programming model that revolves around the ability for a program to halt its execution and move to a new environment where execution can then be resumed. Roaming the network may require collaboration with other agents even when the agents may not share a common goal. Mobile agents are typically autonomous, and perceivably intelligent, capable of dynamically deciding their ...