Design of a Secure and Decentralized Location Service for Agent Platforms

Agent platforms designed for Internet-scale, open networks need scal- able and secure location services for agents and services. The location service based on the Fonkey public key distribution infrastructure presented in this pa- per has been designed and implemented for this purpose. It is scalable in the total number of published identifier-contact address pairs, the number of up- dates/changes, and the number of agent platforms publishing and requesting con- tact addresses. This system also supports a signing mechanism to authenticate the publisher of an identifier-contact address pair. Experimental results show that the current implementation based on the Bunshin/Free Pastry overlay network exhibits good scaling behavior.