Key Distribution Framework for a Mobile Agent Platform

Abstract

Mobile agents have been proposed as a distributed programming model for large-scale distributed systems. The model is appealing as a response to many of the challenges in today's large scale distributed environments: efficiency, heterogeneity, autonomy, etc. Electronic commerce, data mining, and network management are examples of applications domains. Though the model is very well understood by industrial and research communities, aspects still need to be investigated. In this paper, we investigate a key distribution approach suitable for mobile agents. The approach takes into account the dynamic behavior of the system: in particular the dynamic agent itinerary and the dynamic platform topology where servers can join and disjoin for/from receiving mobile agents.