Coordination infrastructures for mobile agents

The mobile agent technology is gaining more and more interest in the distributed systems community. In this context, suitable coordination models are needed to handle the coordination, both among mobile agents and between agents and Internet resources. This paper presents two coordination infrastructures that follow two different coordination models: Aglets, based on the message-passing coordination model, and Mobile Agent Reactive Spaces (MARS), based on the Linda-like one. These two approaches are compared in detail, and a mobile-agent application in the area of auction-based negotiation is used to evaluate the pros and cans of the Aglets and MARS solutions in a concrete field. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.