Information processing and collaborative computing using agents over a distributed network of heterogeneous platforms are important for many defense and civil applications. In this chapter, a mobile agent based collaborative and distributed computing framework for network centric information processing is presented using a military application. In this environment, the challenge is to continue processing efficiently while satisfying multiple constraints like computational cost, communication bandwidth, and energy in a distributed network. The authors use mobile agent technology for distributed computing to speed up data processing using the available systems resources in the network. The proposed framework provides a mechanism to bridge the gap between computation resources and dispersed data sources under variable bandwidth constraints. For every computation task raised in the network, a viable system that has resources and data to compute the task is identified and sent to the viable system for completion. Experimental evaluation under the real platform is reported. It shows that in spite of an increase of the communication load in comparison with other solutions the proposed framework leads to a decrease of the computation time.
CAN QUANTUM MECHANICS HELP DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING?