Mobile agents and mobile devices: friendship or difficult relationship?

Abstract

Mobile agent technology has traditionally been recognized as a very useful approach to build applications for mobile computing and wireless environments. However, only a few studies report practical experiences with mobile agents in a mobile medium. This leads us to the following question: can current mobile agent platforms be used effectively in environments with mobile devices? In this paper, we study existing mobile agent platforms by analyzing if they are suitable or not in a mobile environment. We identify some key missing features in the platforms and highlight the requirements and challenges that lie ahead. With this work, we expose existing problems and hope to motivate further research in the area.