Mansion: Building Secure, Large-scale Distributed Mobile Agent Systems
Mansion is a new (mobile) multiagent system aimed at supporting internet-scale
applications by providing a paradigm for the design of systems that
supporting both (replicated) objects and mobile agents. Its goals are to provide
scalability, security and platform independence.
These issues are addressed by a middleware system that supports the paradigm.
The Mansion paradigm is based on the notion of rooms, which contain objects
which are accessible to agents, and which contain hyperlinks which point to
other rooms.
Agents follow
hyperlinks to go to another room, and agents can communicate with each other
in any language using migration transparent communication channels. A
Mansion system can be widely distributed, but agents are generally
not aware of this as they follow logical links (hyperlinks) to migrate
to another room, rather than using an explicit network address to specify
a migration target as is done in most mobile agent systems.
Different worlds (containing rooms)
can be built for different applications, which are
closed off from each other and each maintain their own internal
hyperlink structure. Several
security mechanisms are in place to protect machines against hostile
mobile agents and to control the components (i.e., rooms, hyperlinks, and
objects)
in the world. The world administrator / creator has a large degree of control
over what is in a world and what is not. Still, the system has been designed
such that it is both technically and administratively scalable to very large
sizes, both in the number of participating machines, rooms, and agents,
as in the
number of administrative domains over which the world is distributed.
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Last modified: Thu Mar 30 13:04:44 CEST 2006