Abstract A Hierarchical Model of Mobile Agents and Its Multimedia Applications

This paper presents a new framework for constructing networked applications, including multimedia ones. The framework is based on a hierarchical mobile agent system for allowing more than one mobile agent to be dynamically assembled into a single mobile agent. Networked applications constructed in the framework can be implemented as a collection of mobile agents and can dynamically change and evolve their own functions by migrating agents that offer the functions. To demonstrate how to exploit our framework we construct extensible multimedia applications based on the framework.