Mobile agent technology for the management of distributed systems - a case study

Mobile agent technology has become an alternative approach for the design of distributed systems to the traditional client-server and message-based architectures. The main difference between the two technologies is the key solution they provide for the distribution problems: local interaction and mobile logic versus location transparency. An important example of their application, where the advantages of mobile agent technology are exploited best, is the management of distributed systems. This paper presents an implementation example of the mobile agents used to access and to manage information stored in the distributed database repository (DDR), as specified within the ESPRIT Project `Network Oriented Application Harmonization' (NOAH).