Mobile Agent for Distributed Information Retrieval System

Abstract

A mobile agent is an executing program that can migrate during execution from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. On each machine, the agent interacts with stationary service agents and other resources to accomplish its task. Consequently, mobile agents are particularly attractive in distributed information retrieval applications. On behalf of a user, by migrating to the location of an information resource, the agent can search the resource locally, eliminating the transfer of intermediate results across the network and reducing end-to-end latency. By deploying the abilities of mobile agent, this thesis develops a system which can control and manage the distributed information retrieval processing in order to search for the required technical papers from distributed database throughout a network. In this system, the mobile agents can migrate from a host node to various destinations, perform data processing there and send the relevant information back to the host. In order to facilitate such a set of events and actions, many development platforms are available. In this thesis, Java programming language and Java-based mobile agent system, called the Aglets workbench, created by IBM are fully deployed in order to develop the proposed system.