Location management of mobile agents based on their behaviour

A Mobile Agent (MA) is a software module that is able to migrate autonomously from host to host in a computer network. Not only mobile agents can handle their own task individually, but also mobile agents can achieve a single task cooperatively by communicating with each other over a computer network. In order to realize communication bewtween mobile agents, it is necessary to develop location management schemes that enable mobile agents to retrieve information about the location of mobile agents, i.e., the host in which the mobile agents reside. In this paper, we propose a location management scheme that exploits behavior, or movement pattern between hosts, of mobile agents. A salient feature of the proposed scheme is that it determines the host that a mobile agent visits frequently, and begins to search the mobile agent from the host. By computer simulation, we confirm that the proposed scheme can reduce the cost of searching mobile agents while it preserves scalability against increasing number of mobile agents.