Mobile agents can be seen as a new paradigm for distributed computing. At Friedrich Schiller University, we have developed our own mobile agent system, called Tracy. Tracy is implemented in Java 2. One characteristic of mobile agents is their autonomy and pro-activity. We designed a framework on top of Tracy to support our research in this domain. Our framework consists of three modules. The Map Module collects information on the available network of agent servers (agencies). By this means, a mobile agent is able to locate services within the network. Furthermore, the framework provides a route planning module and an optimization module, which minimizes network load respectively transmission time. These modules support a fast and ef.cient navigation through the network, which is an environment with an inherently dynamical behavior. The basis for this project is the Tracy Domain Service, which is a hierarchical arrangement of agent servers that groups agencies into a federation of networked local clusters, so called domains.

The focus of the paper is to evaluate the basic concepts and the actual modules of this framework. We made some measurements to characterize the modules? quality and to identify problems. Furthermore, we take a .rst look at the possible performance enhancement of mobile agents which are using the framework.