| The world of Internet provides millions of computers and a great number of servers hosting an information retrieval system such as databases. The casual way used to search, extract and compile information contained in this gigantic pool of data, is based on a client-server architecture. A new approach to distributed information retrieval has seen the light of day a few decades ago with the merging of AI technology (for information retrieval) and Distributed Computing (to cope easily with distributed database).; Mobile-Agent systems, although well suited for distributed information retrieval, bring to the Internet world much more. Half way between Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Computing, the motto of Mobile Agents is: “ move the computations to the data rather than the data to the computations ”.; This thesis presents a novel agent-migration protocol developed in the IMAGO system. The IMAGO (Intelligent Mobile Agent Gliding On-line) system is an infrastructure for Mobile Agent applications. The major feature of this system is that it is capable of coping with both agent migration and inter-agent communication by deploying a simple, reliable agent migration protocol.; Our approach will focus on the protocol stack as well as its implementation—a multi-threaded, versatile scheduler that associates threads of control with the data flow rather than the instruction flow. Overall, the stack architecture of the IMAGO agent-migration protocol provides the flexibility, reliability and security required in the MA paradigm with a minimum footprint. It also implements some “cutting edge” technologies in multi-thread management. |
