Using the publish-subscribe communication genre for mobile agents

We advocate the event-based communication genre for mobile agent communities, which is useful for exchanging and disseminating large volumes of small lightweight messages. We propose that the publish-subscribe model complements the proprietary or standard agent communication languages. We describe how we implemented the event notification mechanism for mobile agents, and analyse experiments that demonstrate the Elvin-based event notification mechanism for communication between heterogeneous agents, in particular, Grasshopper agents and Aglets. We also discuss experiments for measuring message losses due to agent migration.