Overview

Multi-agent systems depend on location services to provide a means to contact agents and/or services (resources). Agent platforms situated in Internet-scale, open networks require scalable and secure location service infrastructure for proper operation.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a very successful realization of a location service that resolves symbolic names to contact addresses (IP addresses). DNS was not designed to cope with highly dynamic entities such as mobile agents. Not only are agents continuously created and deleted, they also traverse the Internet, migrating from location to location, requiring contact address updates continually.

Approach

A design of a scalable and secure location service is based on the Fonkey system. Fonkey is an infrastructure to globally distribute public keys with some additional information. In the location service, the additional information is agent location information, optionally signed by other public keys. For (recursive) verification of signatures, a “web of trust” of public keys is required.

The Fonkey-based location service provides registration, deregistration, and retrieval of agent location information. The combined distribution of public keys and signed location information allows for authorized location updates and integrity of location information. The basic functionality provided by the location service—registering, deregistering, and retrieving agent location information—is not directly available in Fonkey. Therefore,a client library implementing the basic location service functionality has been developed.