Remote Method Invocation and Mobile Agent: A Comparative Analysis

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm used to implement the information storage and retrieval system in a distributed computing environment. Simulation program was developed to measure the performance of MA and RMI using object oriented programming language (the following parameters: search time, fault tolerance and invocation cost. We used search time, fault tolerance and invocation cost as performance parameters in this research work. Experimental results showed that Mobile Agent paradigm offers a superior performance compared to RMI paradigm, offers fast computational speed; procure lower invocation cost by making local invocations instead of remote invocations over the network, thereby reducing network bandwidth. Finally MA has a better fault tolerance than the RMI. With a probability of failure pr = 0.1, mobile agent degrades gracefully.