Introduction
Mobile Agent Framework (MAF) is a research prototype which carries
the following specific goals in mind. First, it aims to provide a
set of primitives to facilitate the development of distributed
mobile agent; Second, it strives to meet the application requirement
from distributed sensor field, which is to provide a light-weight,
self-organized and secure agent platform; Third, although this
framework itself is primarily developed using Python language, it should
provide a mechanism to be able to incorporate and integrate
effortlessly with a variety of "foreign agents" written in other
languages such as C and C++. Fourth, we also want to provide certain
simulation tools to evaluate the performance of this computing
paradigm with others. (see the following figure for illustration)
Download
For new releases, go to
sourceforge download page.
Installation and Run the demo
The core framework is quite neural, which should run on all
platforms which support Python. For any foreign agent programmed
using C/C++, the shared library (.so) might need to be recompiled
for that specific platform.
For a demonstration of how it works, we have programmed a very
simple "DiskAgent.py", whose sole mission is to follow a pre-defined
itinerary and collect free disk space information. At the end, it
must come back and report the result to its master.
- Edit
"maf.conf", where section
[itinerary] dictates how agents should migrate to next
hop, node0 must be the next hop, while the last node
must be its master node.
- Each possible intermediate node should have a
mafserv running as a daemon. Its primary
responsibilities include listening to a
well-known port, execute the agent, and relay it to the next hop.
- Once above preparation is ready, at the master node,
mafstart is responsible for kicking off the "DiskAgent"
by calling migrate(agent)
CVS Access
Sourceforge provides several ways to access the source code remotely:
- Browse the code in CVS: click
here.
- Checkout a copy annoymously
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.maf.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/maf
login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.maf.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/maf
co maf
- Checkout a copy as a developer. Noted that only project
developers can access the CVS tree via this method. SSH1 must be
installed on your client machine. Substitute modulename and
developername with the proper values. Enter your site password when
prompted.
export CVS_RSH=ssh
cvs -z3 -d:ext:developername@cvs.maf.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/maf co maf
Send comments to Hairong Qi
$Date: 2001/04/18 00:22:32 $
