MP-IR: A market-oriented mobile agents system for distributed information retrieval

Abstract

Most of the Information Retrieval (IR) systems are built on the Client - Server paradigm. While agent-based market systems have relative success, agent-based IR systems seem to fail. Recently, works on a mobile agent-based approach for the search of information on the World Wide Web arise. Indeed, the emergence of mobile agent has given the researchers a new way to achieve efficient mobile agents-based IR systems. This paradigm certainly holds great promise, though the lack of results in reliability and security issues. However, we feel that integrating market mechanisms to a new mobile agent model should improve security while bringing the possibility to solve non market applications problems. In this paper, we present how to use a mobile agent-based approach. The main idea is to generalize the market mechanisms to non-market systems such as IR through an extended mobile agents' model, the seller - buyer model. Then, we present the architecture of a secure mobile agent-based searching system that derives from a general mobile agents-based architecture. Finally, we give an experimental validation to our proposition. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.