A Service-oriented Software Architecture for Mobile Agent Toolkits

In this paper we propose a new software architecture formobile agent toolkits. Agent toolkits mainly consist of asoftware system that forms an agency, which is responsibleto host mobile and stationary software agents. In contrastto most architectures developed so far, which already definea large set of high-level services for agent migrationand communication, we propose to employ a kernel-basedapproach. The kernel only provides fundamental conceptsand functions and abstracts from any of these high-level services.We propose a new model for agencies and present ourTracy mobile agent toolkit acting as a reference implementationof our new model.