BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR96-280
ENTRY:: March 05, 1996
ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science
TITLE:: An RPC Mechanism for Transportable Agents
TYPE:: Technical Report (paper)
REVISION:: 1
AUTHOR:: Nog, Saurab    
AUTHOR:: Chawla, Sumit     
AUTHOR:: Kotz, David 
DATE:: March 1996
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email <reports@cs.dartmouth.edu>
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to
       Technical Report Librarian
       Department of Computer Science
       Dartmouth College
       6211 Sudikoff Laboratory
       Hanover, NH 03755-3510
       USA
RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR96-280.ps.Z
RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR96-280.pdf
ABSTRACT:: 
Transportable agents are autonomous programs that migrate from machine
to machine, performing complex processing at each step to satisfy
client requests. As part of their duties agents often need to
communicate with other agents. We propose to use remote procedure call
(RPC) along with a flexible interface definition language (IDL), to
add structure to inter-agent communication. The real power of our
Agent RPC comes from a client-server binding mechanism based on
flexible IDL matching and from support for multiple simultaneous
bindings. Our agents are programmed in Agent Tcl; we describe how the
Tcl implementation made RPC particularly easy to implement. Finally,
although our RPC is designed for Agent Tcl programs, the concepts
would also work for standard Tcl programs.
END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR96-280