Development of the Strong Migration Mobile Agent System Agent Sphere for Autonomic Distributed Processing

Authors have developed a strong migration mobile agent system using Java. In order to make strong migration possible on usual JVM, we have already proposed an automatic code transformation method for such agents In this paper, in order to apply this strong migration mobile agent system to autonomic distributed processing, the system, called AgentSphere, which offers the space where agents can be active is proposed. Agents can perform their processing by entering into AgentSphere on any machine. AgentSphere consists of the core systems and the subsystems which support an agent's activities. As some of the core systems, a class loader which updates class files dynamically with agents' migration and the communication facility among AgentSpheres are designed and implemented. Moreover, as one of the subsystems, a virtual file system for autonomic distributed processing is implemented using out mobile agents.