Efficient Service Discovery in Large-scale Mobile Agent Systems: a Self-adaptive Infrastructure for Robust Communication in Highly Distributed Software Systems

Mobile agent technology represents a paradigm to implement large-scale distributed software systems for highly dynamic networks. Such systems gain their functionality through software entities, so-called agents, which migrate between networked computers and use provided services. Thus, mobile agents must identify and navigate to suitable nodes in order to fulfill their tasks. Autonomous planning and navigation, in turn, require handling of large amounts of service descriptions and routing information, but existing infrastructures are challenged by these requirements as they do not scale with the volume of information, underlying network dynamics, and frequency of changes. Against this background, a novel infrastructure, QuickLinkNet, is being developed at the University of Jena, Germany. QuickLinkNet represents a multi-tier middleware that can cope with the demands of modern service-oriented systems in distributed environments. This book introduces the top tier represented by the APLICOOVER software component which employs peer-to-peer technology to establish a self-adapting and fault-tolerant software layer that allows building global-scale mobile agent systems.