ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF USING MOBILE AGENT APPROACH


Comparing these three distributed paradigms ” server-client, code on demand, and mobile agent ” it can be seen that mobile agent exhibits greater flexibility. Furthermore, mobile agent possesses the following advantages:

  1. Mobile agent moves computation code to data, and the intermediate results passing are reduced. The network bandwidth consumption is reduced.

  2. The agents do not require a continuous connection between machines (Huhns & Singh, 1997). The client can dispatch an agent into the network when the network connection is healthy , then it can go offline. The network connection needs to be reestablished later only when the result was returned by agents from remote host. Hence, it provides a more reliable performance when the network connection is intermittent or unreliable (Pals et al., 2000).

  3. Agent operates asynchronously and autonomously, and the user doesn't need to monitor the agent as it roams in the Internet. This saves time for the user , reduces communication costs, and decentralizes network structure.

  4. With adaptive learning and automation added to agents, the agent can be tooled with AI for information retrieval and filtering.

The main problem with mobile agent is security (see Ghanea & Gifford, 2001), which is still an area of research on its own. In an agent system with a low level of security, the mobile agent may harm the host or the host may harm the mobile agent.

With the above properties, the software language to construct a mobile agent system should be object-oriented and platform independent, with communication capability and implement code security (James, 1996). At present, the languages being used for mobile agent include Java, Telescript, and Tcl. IBM Aglet with Java is a popular tool, and we selected it as the platform for this project.




(ed.) Intelligent Agents for Data Mining and Information Retrieval
(ed.) Intelligent Agents for Data Mining and Information Retrieval
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 171

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net