Mobile agent-based file system for the WOS: An overview

With the advent of high-speed networks and almost universal public Internet access, it becomes a natural expectation that many localized services will become distributed: network bandwidth will be a fair trade for seldom-used local hardware. Recently, intelligent agents have been identified as a fascinating network-design paradigm: many conventional client-server designs/implementations have begun to be mapped into an agent-based model. In many cases, the agent-model presents no advances over the client/server approach, though in at least some domains agents have proven to offer significant benefits. This paper will discuss the design of an agent-based distributed file system. Conventional distributed file systems have recently received tremendous attention throughout the academic world and indeed throughout industry (the Andrew File System perhaps being the most notable) (Morris et al. 1986). We believe, however, that this distribution can be achieved through the use of intelligent agents which themselves manage disk resources. The intent of this file system is to minimize, through the use of agents, the latency overhead inherent in the distribution of a large file-system.