Disseminating mobile agents for distributed information filtering

Abstract

An often-claimed benefit of mobile agent technology is the reduction in communication costs. In particular, the area of information filtering has been proposed for the application of mobile filter agents. However, the effective coordination of agents, which takes into account the current network conditions, is difficult to achieve. This paper analyses the situation where data distributed among various remote data servers is examined with mobile filter agents. We present an approach for coordinating the agents' employment, which minimizes communication costs. Validation studies on the possible cost savings for various configurations show that savings of up to 90% can be achieved in the face of actual Internet conditions.