Design considerations for a CORBA-based architecture for lightweight agents (CARLA)

Abstract

As handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones continue to spread, mobile agent applications are on the brink of moving to these resource-restricted platforms. In a new project named CARLA (CORBA-based Architecture for Lightweight Agents), we are aiming at the development of a specialized architecture for enabling Java-based mobile agents on small devices. In order to provide interoperability with the well-established CORBA world, our architecture is based on the minimumCORBA communication infrastructure, which is a reduced variant of the full CORBA specification. Reducing the memory footprint of CORBA-based mobile agents and their runtime environment for use on handheld devices is one of the most important design goals for the CARLA architecture and, therefore, is the main focus in this paper. Different approaches to this problem are presented and advantages as well as disadvantages of each solution are discussed.