GeoSPRINGS: Towards a location-aware mobile agent platform

Abstract

Mobile agent technology enables the autonomous migration of code from one computer/device to another, to efficiently exploit the available computing resources or access data locally. It can provide interesting advantages in distributed and mobile computing scenarios. However, existing mobile agent platforms do not offer facilities for the design of agents that are location-aware and that can support a variety of communication options, including mobile ad hoc communications. In this paper, we present our ongoing work towards the development of a location-aware mobile agent platform, that we call GeoSPRINGS. The platform provides functionalities for agents to travel to specific geographic locations/areas and to perform geo-cast communications, as well as the capability to operate using both wide-area cellular networks and direct ad hoc communications among the mobile devices.