@techreport{gray:proposal,
    author = {Robert S. Gray},
    title = {Transportable agents},
    year = {1995},
    number = {PCS-TR95-261},
    institution = {Dept. of Computer Science, Dartmouth College},
    copyright = {Robert S. Gray},
    group = {agents},
    note = {Thesis proposal},
    url = {https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/cs_tr/116/},
    keyword = {transportable agents},
    abstract = {One of the paradigms that has been suggested for allowing
efficient access to remote resources is transportable agents. A transportable
agent is a named program that can migrate from machine to machine in a
heterogeneous network. The program chooses when and where to migrate. It can
suspend its execution at an arbitrary point, transport to another machine and
resume execution on the new machine. Transportable agents have several
advantages over the traditional client/server model. Transportable agents
consume less network bandwidth and do not require a connection between
communicating machines -- this is attractive in all networks and particularly
attractive in wireless networks. Transportable agents are a convenient
paradigm for distributed computing since they hide the communication channels
but not the location of the computation. Transportable agents allow clients
and servers to program each other. However transportable agents pose numerous
challenges such as security, privacy and efficiency. Existing transportable
agent systems do not meet all of these challenges. In addition there has been
no formal characterization of the performance of transportable agents. This
thesis addresses these weakness. The thesis has two parts -- (1) formally
characterize the performance of transportable agents through mathematical
analysis and network simulation and (2) implement a complete transportable
agent system.}
}