A performance evaluation of the mobile agent paradigm

Abstract

This paper presents a performance evaluation of the mobile agent paradigm in comparison to the client/server paradigm. This evaluation has been conducted on top of the Java environment, using respectively RMI, the Aglets mobile agents platform and a mobile agents prototype that we implemented. The measurements give the cost of the basic mechanisms involved in the implementation of a mobile agent platform, and a comparative evaluation of the two considered models (client/server and mobile agents) through two application scenarios. The results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained using mobile agents.