A WS-Agreement Based Resource Negotiation Framework for Mobile Agents

Abstract

Mobile agents require access to computing resources on heterogeneous systems across the Internet. They need to be able to negotiate their requirements with the systems on which they wish to be hosted. This paper presents a negotiation infrastructure with which agents acquire time-limited resource contracts through negotiation with one or more mediators instead of individual hosting systems. Mediators represent groups of autonomous hosts. The negotiation protocol and language are based on the WS-Agreement Specification, and have been implemented and tested within the AgentScape framework.