Comparison and Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agent Platforms

Raquel Trillo, Sergio Ilarri, Eduardo Mena
2007 Third International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS'07)  
Mobile agents are considered a very interesting technology to develop applications for mobile, pervasive, and distributed computing. Thus, they present a combination of unique features, such as their autonomy and capability to move to remote computers to process data there and save remote communications. Many mobile agent platforms have been developed since the late nineties. While some of them have been abandoned, others continue releasing new versions that fix bugs detected or offer new
more » ... sting features. Moreover, other new platforms have appeared in the last few years. So, a common problem when one wants to benefit from mobile agent technology to develop distributed applications is the decision about which platform to use. In this paper, we provide an up-to-date evaluation of existing mobile agent platforms. We compare them qualitatively and evaluate their performance in a variety of settings with an extensive set of experiments. • Only SPRINGS is able to finish the test (in 40 seconds). • The second best platform is Voyager, where 58 out of the 100 agents are able to finish. At time instant 2:05, agents in Voyager have performed 3576 iterations in total and they are not able to progress anymore. • The third best platform is Grasshopper, with 53 agents finished and 3334 iterations performed. From time instant
doi:10.1109/conielecomp.2007.66 fatcat:masvxevlp5ft3gon65wvalbfmy