  The field of mobile agent (MA) technology has been intensively researched
during the past few years, resulting in the phenomenal proliferation of
available MA platforms, all sharing several common design characteristics.
Research projects have mainly focused on identifying applications where the
employment of MAs is preferable compared to centralised or alternative
distributed computing models. Very little work has been made on examining how
MA platforms design can be optimised so as the network traffic and latency
associated with MA transfers are minimised. The work presented in this paper
addresses these issues by investigating the effect of several optimisation
ideas applied on our MA platform prototype. Furthermore, we discuss the results
of a set of timing experiments that offers a better understanding of the agent
migration process and recommend new techniques for reducing MA transfers delay.
