Agents Jumping in the Air: Dream or Reality? ⋆ Oscar Urra, Sergio Ilarri, and Eduardo Mena Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, University of Zaragoza, Mar´ ıa de Luna 1, 50018, Zaragoza, Spain ourra@ita.es,{silarri,emena}@unizar.es Abstract. Mobile agent technology has traditionally been recognized as a very useful approach to build applications for mobile computing and wireless environments. However, only a few studies report practical experiences with mobile agents in a wireless medium. This leads us to the following question: is mobile agent technology ready to be used in this environment? In this paper, we study existing mobile agent platforms by analyzing if they could be used effectively in a wireless medium. We identify some key missing features in the platforms and highlight the requirements and challenges that lie ahead. With this work, we expose existing problems and hope to motivate further research in the area. 1 Introduction Mobile agents [6] are programs that execute in contexts called places, hosted on computers, and can autonomously travel from place to place resuming their execution there. Thus, they are not bound to the computer where they were created; instead, they can move freely between computers. Mobile agents provide interesting features, thanks to their autonomy, adapt- ability, and capability to move to remote computers. They can carry the compu- tation wherever it is necessary, without the need of installing specialized servers there (only a generic mobile agent platform [12] is needed). In particular, the in- terest of mobile agent technology for wireless environments has been emphasized in the literature (e.g., see [10]). Thus, for example, instead of communicating a large amount of data from a computer to a mobile device, a mobile agent can move to that computer to process the data locally, filtering the non-relevant data that should not be communicated through the network. As another example, a mobile device could use a mobile agent to perform a processing-intensive task on a fixed computer with the required resources, relieving the overload of the mobile device. This will increase, in turn, its battery life, which is an important limitation on these devices. However, and despite mobile agent technology has been evaluated in many research works in the context of distributed systems, there are only a few re- ported experiences on the use of mobile agents in real wireless environments with ⋆ This work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2007-68091-C02-02. J. Cabestany et al. (Eds.): IWANN 2009, Part I, LNCS 5517, pp. 627–634, 2009. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009