A framework of using cooperating mobile agents to achieve load sharing in distributed web server groups

This paper studies the issues of using mobile agents to achieve load sharing for network services in a wide-area network environment such as the Internet. Traditionally, load sharing algorithms are based on the message-passing paradigm. In this paper, we propose the use of mobile agents as an aid to design fully distributed and dynamic load-sharing mechanisms for wide-area network services, which provide several advantages over the pure message-passing-based approach. A framework (called MALS-mobile agent-enabled load-sharing) for structuring and designing load sharing in wide-area network services is presented. In particular, we describe the design of a mobile agent-enabled distributed dynamic load-sharing scheme within the MALS framework. A simulation environment of the load-sharing protocol is being implemented using Aglet(TM), a Java-compliant mobile agent platform front IBM. Preliminary experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework is effective. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.