Mobile Agent Technology: Current Trends and Perspectives MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY: CURRENT TRENDS AND PERSPECTIVES G. Cabri, L. Leonardi, F. Zambonelli 1 New technologies are required to face new scenarios due to the fast spread of the Internet. The paper surveys the current trends of the emerging mobile agent technology. In a high-connected world, agents are the active entities, which roam across network nodes on behalf of their senders. We show some applications that can take advantages from the mobile agent approach. The paper presents the relevant aspects of coordination and security, which are currently discussed in the mobile agent community, pointing out open research directions. 1. INTRODUCTION The wide spread of networks, and, in particular, of networks connected to each other, as the Internet, has imposed new needs that require new paradigms and new technologies. In this scenario, mobile agents have been proposed as a model to cope with the requirements of wide distributed applications [15, 14]. To make the mobile agents widely accepted there are still several open research issues to be faced: appropriate programming languages and coordination models, security, efficiency and standardisation [9]. Our work focuses on two aspects, coordination and security, which we consider to be faced at the level of model, while the other aspects regard the implementation level. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces the reader to mobile agents terminology, specifying what the terms agent and mobility mean. Section 3 describes some applications that can be implemented by using mobile agents; these applications point out the advantages derived by a mobile agent approach. Section 4 illustrates some existing systems that implement mobile agents. In section 5 we discuss the coordination issue in mobile agent applications and we propose a taxonomy of different models. Section 6 presents some security issue related to mobile agents systems. Finally, in section 7 we present our conclusions and the directions of future research. 1 Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Ingegneria – Università di Modena