Abstract
This paper aims at evaluating the performance of mobile agent in obtaining data in servers by introducing a factor “lifetime". Lifetime is the time from a mobile agent's creation to dispatch. After clarifying correlations of factors which have been introduced for mobile agent performance, we discuss about the meaning to introduce the lifetime for more efficient information retrieval by mobile agents. Then, with focucing on the lifetime and the number of mobile agents, we formalize the problem about an efficient mobile agent information retrieval, and show that this problem is NP complete. With computer simulations, we examine the effect of lifetime on mobile agent performance in terms of traffic rates. In low traffic rate, the lifetime needs to be determined with taking target existing rates of servers into consideration. On the other hand, in high traffic rate, despite the increase of the number of mobile agents, the use of short lifetime can increase the efficiency in obtaining targets not depending on target existing rates at servers.
