Designing a Foundation for Mobile Agents in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Within this chapter, we present the requirements and a possible conception of a framework, which provides a platform and starting point for the development of mobile agents in peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa, Gnutella, and so forth have reached a widespread use on the Internet. By deploying mobile agents that can travel between network nodes to a large P2P network, one could embrace the peer-to-peer technology and use it for all kinds of services like making network traffic anonymous, distributing storage of documents, replicating contents of heavily accessed Internet sites, trading of information, and so forth. For many of these things there are solutions available, but by using a common framework and moving the logic into the agents, there is the opportunity to access all kinds of information through a common API, which guarantees extensibility and widespread use.