aZIMAS: Web Mobile Agent System

Abstract

Mobile Agents technology opens up new avenues in personalizing and customizing the web experience of users. It provides new possibilities for deploying distributed applications using existing web infrastructure. One of the reasons why mobile agents are not yet popular on the web is due to the lack of an easily deployable framework that would facilitate their existence. Existing mobile agent systems usually require heavy infrastructure that lacks interoperability if deployed on the Internet. In this paper, we describe aZIMAS (almost Zero Infrastructure Mobile Agent System) — a framework that will enable the execution of lightweight mobile agents on the Internet and remove some of the constraints imposed by existing systems. aZIMAS uses existing platform independent protocols like HTTP to achieve code mobility and agent interaction. Our approach involves adding a minimal infrastructure layer, called Agent Environment (AE), over existing web servers and using web browsers as clients. By basing our framework firmly on existing web servers and browsers, we hope to leverage the pervasiveness of web browsers and servers and achieve similar pervasiveness for mobile agents.