JavaSpace : when agents meet peers

The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model has been proven to overcome some of the main limitations of the client-server approach, including the presence of single points of failure, the appearance of bottlenecks around the server and inefficient resource utilization at the edge of the network. P2P technologies, initially fostered by the success of music file sharing applications, have now reached a widespread adoption in a range of domains. MAs are naturally geared to realize peer entities that can move and be discovered, adding an extra dimension to conventional P2P approaches. In this paper we look at how a combination of a particular P2P system (JavaSpace) and MA technologies can provide additional benefits in terms of fault-tolerance, recovery, scalability and load balancing. Through an experimental approach, we illustrate the benefits of the combined MA/P2P approach. Our initial findings indicate that a coherent merge between P2P and MA technologies have enormous potential in the context of mobile distributed computing