B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

392 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
• Mobile agents are dynamic in nature, i.e., they are able to adapt to
new negotiation strategies and protocols, based on the current task.
• Mobile code significantly reduces network traffic due to local agentto-agent
communication. In a distributed application, like the ones
supporting B2B e-commerce, network bandwidth is one of the major
concerns. To successfully complete a single transaction in the B2B
domain, applications of the companies concerned have to communicate
a multiple number of times. In each communication there is a clientserver,
round-trip involved which not only takes the already scarce
network bandwidth, but also slows down the whole process, resulting
in poor performance for the application as a whole. By creating a
mobile agent to handle the query or transaction and sending the agent
from the client to the server, network bandwidth consumption is
reduced and the process becomes much faster.
• Mobile agent architectures also solve the problem created by
intermittent or unreliable network connections. In the conventional
systems, if the network goes down, the whole transaction is aborted.
The users of such applications have to redo all the work to complete
the aborted transaction. In a mobile agent architecture, the client
doesn't talk to the server over the network, instead, the client actually
migrates to the server's machine. Once on the server's machine, the
client makes its requests to the server directly. When the entire
transaction is complete, the mobile agent returns home with the
results.
13.8.2. Potential risks involved in use of
mobile agents
Mobile agents have to expose their code and data to the host environment
that supplies them the means to execute. Due to this feature, agents can
be tampered with, scanned, or, in some extreme cases, even terminated
by malicious servers.
The risks of attack on an agent's activities and fitness are directly
proportional to its mobility (see Figure 13.5). Thus, agents dealing with
highly secured data, such as payment information, should be restricted
in mobility.