Trends in mobile agent applications

In this paper we present a comprehensive study of mobile agent applications. We classify the application fields as follows: Network monitoring and management, information searching and filtering, multimedia, Internet, intrusion detection, telecommunications, military, and others. We discuss the potential uses of mobile agents in the various fields and present the many systems and architectures that have been proposed and implemented. Furthermore, we describe ongoing efforts to integrate currently implemented technologies with mobile agent technology. For each of the application fields, we list statistics showing the distribution of research output according to certain criteria such as article type and application field. We end each section with a summary of the work done and provide directions for future work. Finally, we conclude with suggestions about promising research areas involving mobile agents.