Master Thesis - Past Projects - Abstract

Comparison of three agent platforms performance, scalability and security

ID: LiTH-IDA-Ex-03/070-SE

The software agent paradigm is an evolving technology. The benefits of using agents in distributed computing are for example loose coupling, adaptability and support of heterogeneous systems. The purpose of the thesis was to try to find out how some of the top notch agent platforms of today compare when it comes to measurement of performance, scalability and security. Three platforms were investigated and they are called JADE, Tryllian and SAP. JADE is an open source project with strong resemblance to the specifications of the standard organization FIPA. Tryllian is a commercial product built on top of the peer-to-peer infrastructure JXTA. SAP is a recently developed lightweight platform. The method used for testing the platforms concentrates on agent-to-agent communication in different scenarios. To test the scalability property the platforms were exposed to increased load in the form of number of agents and the size of messages. By using the platforms built in support for message encryption the security aspect was also tested. The distributed nature of agent platforms was also considered by splitting the platform between two hosts. Results obtained from the tests show that the Safeguard platform performs best followed by JADE and last Tryllian. This pattern is seen throughout the whole test series. All results obtained when testing scalability, whether increase in the number of agents or message size prove to be linear with respect to the increased load. When multiple agents are having pair-wise conversations between two platform instances the overhead of using encryption is very low. The poor performance of the Tryllian platform can be explained by the extra abstraction introduced by JXTA. The different levels of abstraction of the platforms are an important factor behind the results obtained.

Keywords: Agent platforms, security, performance, scalability

Author(s): Daniel Garpe

Contact: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani