Class Splitting as a Method to Reduce Migration Overhead of Mobile Agents

Abstract

Mobile agents were introduced as a new design paradigm for distributed systems to reduce network traffic as compared to clientserver based approaches simply by moving code close to the data instead of moving large amount of data to the client. Although this thesis has been proved in many application scenarios, it was also shown that the performance of mobile agents suffers from too simple migration strategies in many other scenarios. This has lead to the development of a new migration protocol, named Kalong, which provides fine-grained transmission of code and data instead of viewing a mobile agent as a single transmission unit. In this paper we report on first results of the application of Kalong to improve the performance of mobile agents by splitting the code of mobile agents. First results show that by using this technique the number of bytes which have to be transferred can be reduced significantly.