A strong migration method of mobile agents based on Java

In many CSCW systems, mobile agents are used to do some important work. However, mobile agents add a notable amount of complexity to all common problems of distributed systems, and cause a couple of new ones, such as location management, frequent disconnection and migration, etc. In this article, we focus on a technique for strong migration of mobile agents. Capturing and re-establishing the agent's state is the most important problem in strong migration of mobile agents. We describe a way to save and restore the state of a running Java-based agent. We achieve this at the language level, without modifying the Java Virtual Machine, by instructing the Java source programs with a preprocessor which is used in a mobile agent scenario to offer strong migration for mobile agents based on Java. The automatically inserted code saves the runtime information when the program requests state saving and re-establishes the program's runtime state on restart.