Evaluation of the Mobile Agents Technology: Comparison with the Client/Server Paradigm

: This paper presents a performance evaluation of the mobile agent paradigm in comparison to the client/server paradigm. This evaluation has been conducted on top of the Java environment, using respectively RMI, the Aglets mobile agents platform and a mobile agents prototype that we implemented. The measurements give the cost of the basic mechanisms involved in the implementation of a mobile agent platform, and a comparative evaluation of the two considered models (client/server and mobile agents) through two application scenarios. The results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained using mobile agents. 1. Introduction Today, the most popular paradigm for structuring distributed applications is the client/server model. It is notably used as a base in the CORBA [Omg91] and Java [Gosling95] environments through a remote object invocation mechanism. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged for structuring distributed applications : mobile agents programming. In this m..