Mobile agents for WWW distributed database access

Abstract

The popularity of Web as a universal access mechanism for network information has created the need for developing web-based DBMS client/server applications. However, the current commercial applet-based methodologies for accessing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability and robustness. In this paper, we propose a new framework for Web-based distributed access to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework supports light-weight, portable and autonomous clients as well as operation on slow expensive networks. The implementation of the framework shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some case outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up environments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptation of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a factor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40% and 30% respectively.