An HTTP-Based Infrastructure for Mobile Agents

Abstract

Mobile agents are an emerging technology attracting interest from the fields of distributed systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, and artificial intelligence. We present an infrastructure for mobile agents based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which provides for agent mobility across heterogeneous networks as well as communications among agents. Our infrastructure supports the implementation and interoperation of agents written in various languages and takes advantage of current research in HTTP and the World Wide Web in general.