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Abstract Mobile agent technology has received a rapidly growing
attention over the last few years. A number of mobile agent systems
are under development in academic as well as industrial
environments, there are already various moves to popularize and
standardize mobile agent facilities and architectures. It has been
argued that mobile agents provide certain advantages as compared to
traditional approaches in terms of providing facilities like
software-distribution on demand at reduced communication costs,
better support for asynchronous tasks, and scalibility due to
dynamic deployment which is based on a taxonomy of mobility. The
employment of mobile agents has been particularly attractive in
applications like information retrieval in widely distributed
heterogeneous environments, network management, electronic commerce
and in mobile computing.
Inspite of all this growing interest and efforts the agent
technology is in a fairly early stage and a number of technical
problems should be solved in order to make this new technology a
commercial success. These open problems include mechenisms for agent
security, control structures, transactional support, and design of
communication models. In this paper we extend previous research
conducted on mobile agents regarding their communication performance
models. It has been indicated that the optimal performance of an
agent is achieved by a critical sequence of mixed remote procedure
calls and agent migration. We provide here exact algorithms to solve
various variants of this problem under certain restrictions on the
sequence of interactions of the mobile agents.
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