Application of mobile agent in wide area network

Abstract

Recently, a new paradigm has emerged for structuring distributed network applications: mobile agents programming. Mobile agents are mainly intended to be used for applications distributed over large scale (slow) networks because they allow saving communication costs by moving computation to the host on which the target data resides. In this paper, our work includes three parts: (1) we introduce mobile agent into large scale distributed file system: The mobile agent-based distributed file system (MADFS). MADFS uses mobile agents as the underlying facility for transfer, communication and synchronization; (2) we present a novel high-performance runtime codes leading mechanism for mobile agents in wide area network (WAN); (3) we present a novel cache coherency mechanism which is designed for MADFS: hierarchical and convergent cache coherency mechanism (HCCM). HCCM use mobile agent to effectively reduce the cache management overhead in distributed file system.