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Mobile agent is a distributed program which can move autonomously in a network, to perform its tasks, on behalf of the user. During migration, the mobile agents and so its data are susceptible to failures due to the faults in the network components like the machine and the channel. It is a challenging issue to address the mobile agent failure scenario during its migration. This paper presents a failure recovery model for mobile agents that ensure the recovery of the lost mobile agent and the data. This is done by allowing a replication of the actual mobile agent at the previously visited servers. However, unlike existing methods, in this paper the replication is temporary and limited to an optimal value. This is achieved by making the mobile agents that operates in multi-region environment, to track, communicate and share the retrieved information between them. After the information sharing, in this paper, the number of replica to be maintained at each region is reduced to one. Furthermore, as there is at least one server in each region that holds the replica, this paper guarantees that the information collected at each server is not lost. In addition, the presented model survives the region failure too, when implemented in a multi-region environment. Experiments were conducted in a web environment, and the results obtained are analyzed and compared with existing methods, based on different testing parameters. The experimental results appear to be more encouraging in claiming the presented recovery model to be a reliable one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Virtual Home Environment is very important in contemporary mobile telecommunications infrastructure as it caters for the ubiquitous provision of services irrespective of network, location and user device. The universality of systems like Universal Mobile Telecommunications System and wi-fi increases the need for the rapid introduction of efficient VHE schemes. In this paper, we study the adoption of Mobile Agents for handling the VHE functionality. Mobile agents are nicely harmonized with the broader idea of VHE as they allow the autonomous execution of tasks by components that roam from node to node and network to network. We present the detailed modeling of a VHE provisioning architecture and investigate its suitability for different use cases and technical options (e.g., end user devices). The adoption of mobile agents for the ubiquitous provision of telecommunication services is quite promising in terms of efficiency. Through a series of experiments we quantify the performance benefits stemming from the adoption of mobile agents in contrast to conventional service provisioning schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a framework for reusable mobile agents for network management in the sense that they are independent of either particular networks or applications. The framework enables a mobile agent to be composed from two layered components, which are mobile agents. The former is a carrier of the latter over particular networks independent of any management tasks and the latter defines management tasks performed at each host independently of any networks. The framework also oilers a mechanism for matchmaking the two components. Since the mechanism is formulated on a process algebra approach, it can accurately select the appropriate itinerary component to perform management tasks at hosts that the tasks want to visit over networks. The framework provides a methodology for easily developing and operating mobile agents for traveling among multiple sub-networks to perform their management tasks at all of the nodes that they visit. This paper also describes the framework, its prototype implementation, and a practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile agent technology has been applied to develop the solutions for various kinds of parallel and distributed computing problems. However, performance evaluation of mobile agent algorithms remains a difficult task, mainly due to the characteristics of mobile agents such as distributed and asynchronous execution, autonomy and mobility. This paper proposes a general approach based on direct execution simulation for evaluating the performance of mobile agent algorithms by collecting and analyzing the information about the agents during their execution. We describe the proposed generic simulation model, named MADES, the architecture of a software environment based on MADES, and a prototype implementation. A mobile agent-based distributed load balancing algorithm has been used for experiments with the prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are distributed real-time systems that detect unauthorized use or attacks upon an organization's network and/or hosts. The components of most distributed IDSs are arranged in a hierarchical tree structure, where the sensor nodes pass information to the analyzer nodes. Optimal placement of the analyzer nodes results in an improved response time for the IDS, and isolation of attacks within the IDS network. Since the network topology and workload are constantly changing, we are able to maintain near-optimal placement of the analyzer nodes by instantiating them as mobile agents. The analyzer nodes may then relocate, reproduce or be deleted as necessary. Such flexibility improves the response times and the stability of an IDS. The movement of the analyzer nodes also offers some protection against denial-of service attacks, since secure analyzer nodes will be relocated to take over some of the functionality of the host under attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]