%T Mobile Agents Simulation with DaSSF
%A Nikita E Dubrovsky
%R Technical Report TR2004-499
%I Dartmouth College, Computer Science
%C Hanover, NH
%D June 2004
%U http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2004-499.pdf
%X
 Mobile agents are programs that can migrate from machine to machine in a network of computers and have complete control over their movement. Since the performance space of mobile agents has not been characterized fully, assessing the effectiveness of using mobile agents over a traditional client/server approach currently requires implementing an agent system and running time-consuming experiments.
   This report presents a simple mobile-agent simulation that can provide quick information on the performance and scalability of a generic information retrieval (IR) mobile-agent system under different network configurations. The simulation is built using the DaSSF and DaSSFNet frameworks, resulting in high performance and great configuration flexibility. This report also implements a real D'Agents mobile-agent IR system, measuring the performance of the system. A comparison of these real-world performance results and those given by the simulation suggest that the simulation has good accuracy in predicting the scalability of a mobile-agent system. Thus this report argues that simulation provides a good way to quickly assess the performance and scalability of an IR mobile-agent system under different network configurations.
%Z
 Senior Honors Thesis.  Advisor: Bob Gray.