An infrastructure-based approach to support dynamic networks with mobile agents

Abstract

With the growing size of distributed systems and the higher number of available resources and services in networks dynamical aspects become more and more important in systems engineering. We believe that there is a real need for decentral, self-organizing structures to cope with the upcoming challenges. In this paper we describe a framework which provides a self-organizing infrastructure that allows to link otherwise autonomous elements in a flexible way and adapts dynamically to changes in the underlying network. This framework is implemented as an extension of the mobile agent system Tracy, which is also a product of our university. The Tracy Domain Management module is part of the framework and provides the basis for segmenting the infrastructure. Another module we are going to discuss in this paper facilitates autonomous and proactive routing of mobile agents. Agents form the application layer of the system. Routing is triggered by the needs an agent inherits from its owner and then matched to the resources and services available in the network in an iterative fashion. We describe concepts, design issues and first results of our work with Tracy and the use of these additional Tracy modules. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.