A Database Service Discovery Model for Mobile Agents

Abstract

One of the main challenges of mobile agent technology is how to locate hosts that provide services requested by mobile agents. Traditional service location protocols can be applied to mobile agent systems in order to explore the service discovery issue. However, because of their architecture deficiencies, they adequately do not solve all the problems that arise in a dynamic domain such as database location discovery. From this point of view, we need some enhanced service discovery techniques for the mobile agent community. This article proposes a new model for solving the database service location problem in the domain of mobile agents by implementing a service discovery module based on search engine techniques. As a typical interface provided by a mobile agent server, the service discovery module improves the decision ability of mobile agents with respect to information retrieval. This research is part of the IMAGO system, an infrastructure for mobile agent applications. This article focuses on the design of an independent search engine, IMAGOSearch, and discusses how to integrate service discovery into the IMAGO system, thus providing a global scope service location tool for intelligent mobile agents.