17-09-2009, 10:27 PM
Mobile Agents In Distributed Multimedia Database Systems
Abstract: The size of networks is increasing rapidly and this fact is not straitened to the internet alone. Many intra and inter“organization networks are affected by this trend, too. A side effect of this growth is the increase of network traffic. This development leads to new challenges and we have to think about new technologies. Mobile agent systems are one answer to these challenges. Mobile agents are an emerging technology attracting interest from the fields of distributed systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce and artificial intelligence.
A mobile agent is an executing program that can migrate during execution from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. On each machine, the agent interacts with stationary service agents and other resources to accomplish its task, returning to its home site with a final result when that task is finished. Mobile agents are particularly attractive in distributed information-retrieval applications. By moving to the location of an information resource, the agent can search the resource locally, eliminating the transfer of intermediate results across the network and reducing end-to-end latency. Mobile agents are goal-oriented, can communicate with other agents, and can continue to operate even after the machine that launched them has been removed from the network.
The mobile feature enables the agent to travel to the host where the data are physically stored. This is obviously of great interest in a distributed multimedia database systems where we have in most cases large binary objects. This Project integrates mobile agent technology in a distributed database system. The advantage of this approach is the combination of mobile agent features (e.g. autonomy, mobility, enhancement of functionality) and database services such as recovery, transaction handling, concurrency and security. This projects aims at facilitating storage and retrieval of multimedia data from the distributed multimedia database using mobile agents based on host database which will provide the result to the user upon request.