The book focuses on mobile agents, which are computer programs that can autonomously migrate between network sites. This text introduces the concepts and principles of mobile agents, provides an overview of mobile agent technology, and focuses on applications in networking and distributed computing.

Mobile agents refer to self-contained and identi?able computer programs that can move within the network and can act on behalf of the user or another entity. Most of the current research work on the mobile agent paradigm has two general goals: reduction of network traf?c and asynchronous interaction. These two goals stem directly from the desire to reduce information overload and to ef?ciently use network resources. There are certainly many motivations for the use of a mobile agent paradigm; h- ever, intelligent information retrieval, network and mobility management, and network services are currently the three most cited application targets for a mobile agent system. The aim of the workshop is to provide a unique opportunity for researchers, software and application developers, and computer network technologists to discuss new dev- opments in the mobile agent technology and applications. After last year’s very successful workshop in Ottawa, Canada (110 attendees), this year’s workshop will focus on mobile agent issues across the areas of network m- agement, mobile applications, nomadic computing, e-commerce, ad-hoc networks and applications, feature interactions, Internet applications, QoS management, policybased management, interactive multimedia, and computer–telephony integration.

Mobile agent computing is being used in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, computational economics and robotics. Agents' ability to adapt dynamically and execute asynchronously and autonomously brings potential advantages in terms of fault-tolerance, flexibility and simplicity. This monograph focuses on studying mobile agents as modelled in distributed systems research and in particular within the framework of research performed in the distributed algorithms community. It studies the fundamental question of how to achieve rendezvous, the gathering of two or more agents at the same node of a network. Like leader election, such an operation is a useful subroutine in more general computations that may require the agents to synchronize, share information, divide up chores, etc. The work provides an introduction to the algorithmic issues raised by the rendezvous problem in the distributed computing setting. For the most part our investigation concentrates on the simplest case of two agents attempting to rendezvous on a ring network. Other situations including multiple agents, faulty nodes and other topologies are also examined. An extensive bibliography provides many pointers to related work not covered in the text. The presentation has a distinctly algorithmic, rigorous, distributed computing flavor and most results should be easily accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and mathematics departments. Table of Contents: Models for Mobile Agent Computing / Deterministic Rendezvous in a Ring / Multiple Agent Rendezvous in a Ring / Randomized Rendezvous in a Ring / Other Models / Other Topologies

Distributed Computing by Mobile Entities is concerned with the study of the computational and complexity issues arising in systems of decentralized computational entities operating in a spatial universe Encompassing and modeling a large variety of application environments and systems, from robotic swarms to networks of mobile sensors, from software mobile agents in communication networks to crawlers and viruses on the web, the theoretical research in this area intersects distributed computing with the fields of computational geometry (especially for continuous spaces), control theory, graph theory and combinatorics (especially for discrete spaces). The research focus is on determining what tasks can be performed by the entities, under what conditions, and at what cost. In particular, the central question is to determine what minimal hypotheses allow a given problem to be solved. This book is based on the lectures and tutorial presented at the research meeting on “Moving and Computing" (mac) held at La Maddalena Island in June 2017. Greatly expanded, revised and updated, each of the lectures forms an individual Chapter. Together, they provide a map of the current knowledge about the boundaries of distributed computing by mobile entities.

A mobile agent system could be attacked by malicious agents, platforms and third parties. Mobile agents simply offer greater opportunities for abuse and misuse, which broadens the scale of threats significantly. In addition, since mobile agents have some unique characteristics such as their mobility, security problems have become more complicated in these systems. These security problems have become a bottleneck in the development and maintenance of mobile agent systems, especially in security sensitive applications such as electronic commerce. This book introduces the concept and structure of mobile agent systems and discusses various attacks and countermeasures. The emphasis is on the formal modeling and analysis of secure mobile agent systems and their applications. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Introduction (97 KB). Contents: Mobile Agent System; Attacks and Countermeasures of Software System Security; Security Issues in a Mobile Agent System; A New Formal Model OCo Extended Elementary Object System (EEOS); A Formal Framework of a Generic Secure Mobile Agent System Based on EEOS; Translating the EEOS Model to Colored Petri Net Model; Simulation and Analysis of the Extended Elementary Object System Model of a Secure Mobile Agent System; A Case Study in Electronic Commerce; A Case Study in E-Auction System. Readership: Computer scientists, researchers, software engineers, programmers and graduate students in software engineering, networking and automated systems."

The book focuses on mobile agents, which are computer programs that can autonomously migrate between network sites. This text introduces the concepts and principles of mobile agents, provides an overview of mobile agent technology, and focuses on applications in networking and distributed computing.

Recently a new technique for distributed computing software on networks referred to as "mobile agents" has attracted much research attention. A mobile agent is an independent software entity which exists in a software environment. It is an autonomous, intelligent program that moves through a network, searching for and interacting with services on the user's behalf. In this thesis, applications of mobile agents in network management is investigated. Two research areas are addressed, one is network monitoring and the other is network signaling. A network management system (NMS) was developed combining mobile agents, SNMP, Java and web browser technologies. The mobile agent's attributes, such as mobility, delegation, communication, persistence, fault tolerance and independence o platform, are realized in the system. A working demonstration of the system has illustrated a strong variety of capabilities in monitoring network elements. Also implemented were two resource negotiation models for network signaling by mobile agents in a simulated environment. In model 1, all agents involved in establishing a connection will go to one central place for network resource negotiation, but in model 2, only the call initiating agent will go to each intermediate node to negotiate resources with a local agent. Two message-based systems were also implemented for comparison with their corresponding mobile agent models. The resource negotiation uses concepts of economic consumer surplus and burstiness model. The test results show that the mobile agent methods are better than the message-based methods in terms of negotiation time under normal conditions. In addition, the mobile agent of model 1 is better than that of model 2.