Capacity Planning of Mobile Agent Systems : Designing Efficient Intranet Applications

Mobile agents are a quite new and interesting paradigm for the implementation of distributed systems. As with most distributed systems, mobile agent applications are usually developed and installed without regarding performance aspects. Typically, methods and tools for capacity planning differ fundamentally from methods and tools for system development, thus system developers often avoid additional modelling and planning effort. This book helps to solve this problem by presenting an approach to easy integrate performance modelling into the development process of mobile agent applications. Most mobile agent applications contain the same basic scenarios, which include stationary agents with the role of servers and mobile agents as clients. Based on these scenarios, this book describes a new modelling approach and a methodology for capacity planning of mobile agent systems with an emphasis on intranet applications. Moreover, this book focuses on providing algorithms to increase the efficiency of simulation models of mobile agent systems. As existing approaches are not applicable to the presented modelling technique, new methods are developed which consider special features of mobile agent systems. A methodology for capacity planning of general heterogeneous IT systems is adjusted to mobile agent systems according to the developed modelling techniques.