Fragment Transfer Protocol: An IEEE-FIPA based efficient transfer protocol for mobile agents

From the first steps of the mobile agent technology, the main concerns have been its security and interoperability. At the contrary, its performance has been usually relegated to a second place.The main contribution of this article is the proposal of a new agent transfer protocol, called Fragment Transfer Protocol (FrTP), for the Inter-Platform Mobility Architecture (IPMA) that improves the agent migration performance. The new protocol has been designed because a poor agent migration performance is observed in some Agent Middlewares, such as JADE, when large sized code and data agents are transferred. The reason is that the existing IPMA protocols encapsulate too much data in a single IEEE-FIPA ACL message and these Agent Middlewares do not deal well with this situation. Therefore, FrTP proposes to transfer the agent by sending its code and data split into several messages.The new protocol approach is fully compliant with the IEEE-FIPA interoperability agent standards and IPMA framework. Furthermore, it has been integrated into the IPMA implementation for JADE and it has been extensively validated through a set of performance tests carried out on different scenarios. Hence, its usage will strongly improve the performance of agents with large sized codes or data.