Performance comparison of some message transport protocol implementations for agent community communication

Abstract

Like in any distributed community systems, communication in Multi-Agent System (MAS) plays an important role. Communication helps agents share knowledge and cooperate. Agent communication may present at various forms; it can be the exchange of comprehensible messages, a request to perform an action, or cooperation negotiation. Agent communication has common properties like in any other distributed community systems, but it is the use of Agent Communication Language (ACL) that differentiates agent communication from that in other distributed community systems. In this paper, we present an evaluation of some typical Message Transport Protocol (MTP) implementations for agent communication. In order to analyze performance and stability of these MTPs, the tests have been conducted in conjunction with three existing ACL message encoding schemes.