Title: The MP architecture: towards a secure framework for mobile agents

Authors: Djamel Eddine Menacer; Habiba Drias; Christophe Sibertin-Blanc

Addresses: Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique, ESI, BP 68M Oued Smar, 16309, Algiers, Algeria. ' Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediene (USTHB), BP 32, El-Alia, Bab-Ezzouar, Algiers, Algeria. ' IRIT, Université Toulouse 1 – Capitole, 2 place du doyen G. Marty, F-31042 Toulouse cedex, France

Abstract: Currently, distributed applications are mainly based on the client-server model and its variants. The growing use of the internet and the development of mobile communication technologies yield more needs in terms of performance, reliability and security. By its synchronous nature, the client-server model no longer seems to be able to meet these new demands. The mobile agents| paradigm is one of the approaches that have been proposed, and this technology holds great promises with regard to questions related to reliability and security. In this paper, we present the market-place architecture, a secure mobile agents-based framework. The main idea is to generalise the market mechanisms to non-market systems through an extended mobile agents| model, the seller-buyer model. This architecture provides developers with the opportunity to build efficient and safe mobile agents-based distributed applications. We give the outline for designing applications according to the MP architecture and propose a Jade implementation.

Keywords: mobile agents; seller-buyer models; marketplace architecture; distributed applications; security; Jade; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2011.043644

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2011 Vol.4 No.4, pp.390 - 414

Accepted: 06 Sep 2011
Published online: 22 Oct 2014 *

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