Languages for Mobile Agents

Abstract

Mobile agents represent a new model for network computing. Many different languages have been used to implement mobile agents. The characteristics that make a language useful for writing mobile agents are: (1) their support of agent migration, (2) their support for agent-to-agent communication, (3) how they allow agents to interact with local resources, (4) security mechanisms, (5) execution efficiency, (6) language implementation across multiple platforms, and (7) the language's ease of programming of the tasks mobile agents perform.