A survey of theories for mobile agents

  • Authors:

  • Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo;Murhimanya Muhugusa;Christian F. Tschudin

  • Affiliations:

  • Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI), University of Geneva, 24, rue Général-Dufour, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland E-mail: Giovanna.Dimarzo@cui.unige.ch;Microcell Labs Inc., 1250, Blvd. René-Lévesque Ouest, Suite 400, Montréal (Québec), H3B 4W8 Canada;International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA

  • Venue:
  • World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

This paper presents a comparative survey of formalisms related to mobile agents. It describes the \pi-calculus and its extensions, the Ambient calculus, Petri nets, Actors, and the family of generative communication languages. Each of these formalisms defines a mathematical framework that can be used to reason about mobile code; they vary greatly in their expressiveness, in the mechanisms they provide to specify mobile code based applications and in their practical usefulness for the validation and the verification of such applications. In this paper we show how these formalisms can be used to represent the mobility and communication aspects of two mobile code environments: Obliq and Messengers. We compare and classify the different formalisms with respect to mobility and discuss some shortcomings and desirable extensions. We also point to other emerging concepts in formalisms for mobile code systems.