Trusting Mobile Software Agents

by Lora L. Kassab, Jeffrey Voas

In traditional client-server settings, a central and trusted host communicates with statically bound client processes through either asynchronous messages or synchronous remote procedure calls. Mobile agents extend this communication paradigm by providing a more flexible approach for building distributed applications in an Internet-scale setting. A mobile agent is a program that is dispatched from a source computer and autonomously migrates to multiple hosts to perform the tasks (typically resource-intensive computations) for which it was programmed.