MiNet: Building Ad-Hoc Peer-to-Peer Networks for Information Sharing Based on Mobile Agents

The Internet is a very popular for information sharing technology since users can share information in organizations and communities. In this paper, we present a flexible peer-to-peer networking technology for information sharing on the Internet called MiNet. In some certain communities, MiNet can construct an ad-hoc network for information sharing. MiNet enables users to share information based on mobile agents, which are implemented in a mobile agent framework MiLog. MiNet can construct ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks by encapsulating information and sending it as mobile agents that can migrate in MiNet beyond firewalls, proxies, and NATs in LANs. Therefore, MiNet can construct VPNs, which consist of several LANs covered by firewalls, etc. MiNet agents can automatically choose a destination platform according to its policies. We show the document sharing system MiDoc as an application based on MiNet. Since MiDoc is implemented using MiNet, MiDoc users can share any document among any LANs.