Mobile agent

In computer science, a mobile agent is a piece of computer software that is able to migrate (move) from one computer to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer.

Mobile agents are a specific form of mobile code. However, in contrast to the Remote evaluation and Code on demand paradigms, mobile agents are active in that they may choose to migrate between computers at any time during their execution. This makes them a powerful tool for implementing distributed applications in a computer network.

Besides belonging the familiy of mobile code paradigms, mobile agents are also a specific form of software agents.