Mobile Agents for Web Database Access: The DBMS-Aglet Framework
The popularity of Web as a universal access mechanism for network information has created the need for developing web-based DBMS client/server applications. However, the current commercial applet-based methodologies for accessing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability and robustness. In this work, we propose a new framework for Web-based distributed access to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework supports lightweight, portable and autonomous clients as well as operation on slow or expensive networks. The implementation of the framework using the aglet workbench shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some case outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up environments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptation of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a factor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40% and 30% respectively. We expect our framework to perform even better when deployed using different implementation platforms as indicated by our preliminary results from an implementation based on Voyager.
We are currently extending the DBMS-Aglet Framework to create a complete library of database agents (i.e., view agents, warehouse agents, backup agents) from which a user can pick and instantiate the agent required by a specific application. Introducing transactional semantics into the mobile agent-computing paradigm is also in progress.
Related Publications
Journals
Kyriakos Karenos, George Samaras, Panos K. Chrysanthis, Evaggelia Pitoura (2004) "Mobile Agent-Based Services for Database View Materialization", The ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), special issue on “Recent Advances in Mobile Data Management Issues”, Vol. 8 Issue 3, pp. 32-43 (2004)
Papastavrou S., G. Samaras, E. Pitoura (2000) "Mobile Agents for WWW Distributed Database Access", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering Journal (TKDE), Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 802-820, September/October 2000
Conferences and Workshops
George Samaras, Kyriakos Karenos, Panos K. Chrysanthis, Evaggelia Pitoura (2003) "ViSMA: Extendible, Mobile-Agent Based Services for the Materialization and Maintenance of Personalized and Shareable Web Views", 6th International Workshop “Mobility in Databases & Distributed Systems” (MDDS 2003), pp. 974-979, September 1-5, 2003, Prague, Czech Republic
G. Samaras, C. Spyrou, E. Pitoura (2002) "View Generator (VG): A Mobile Agent Based System for the Creation and Maintenance of Web Views", Proc. Of the 7th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC 2002), pp. 761- 767, Taormina, Italy July 2002
Constantinos Spyrou, George Samaras, Evaggelia Pitoura, Stavros Papastavrou, and Panos K. Chrysanthis (2001) "Mobile Agents to Support Views for Wireless and Mobile Client", Proc. 17th International Data Engineering Conference (ICDE 2001), demo session, pp. 1-4, Germany, April 2-6 2001
Stavros Papastavrou, Panos K. Chrysanthis, George Samaras, Evaggelia Pitoura (2000) "An Evaluation of the Java-based Approaches for Web Database Access", Proc. of the Fifth IFCIS International Conf. on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS´2000), pp. 102-113, Israel, Sept. 2000
Stavros Papastavrou, Panos K. Chrysanthis, George Samaras, Evaggelia Pitoura (2000) "A Survey on the Java-based Approaches for Web Database Connectivity", Proceedings of the MELECON 2000 Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference, pp. 290-293, Nicosia, Cyprus, May 2000
Papastavrou S., G. Samaras, E. Pitoura (1999) "Mobile Agents for WWW Distributed Database Access", Proc. 15th International Data Engineering Conference (ICDE 1999), pp. 228-237, Sydney, Australia, March 1999. ICDE´99 Best Paper Award
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