Claimed as the next generation programming paradigm, mobile agent technology has attracted extensive interests in recent years. However, up to now, limited research efforts have been devoted to the performance study of mobile agent system and most of these researches focus on agent behavior analysis resulting in that models are hard to apply to mobile agent systems. To bridge the gap, a new performance evaluation model derived from operation mechanisms of mobile agent platforms is proposed. Details are discussed for the design of companion simulation software, which can provide the system performance such as response time of platform to mobile agent. Further investigation is followed on the determination of model parameters. Finally comparison is made between the model-based simulation results and measurement-based real performance of mobile agent systems. The results show that the proposed model and designed software are effective in evaluating performance characteristics of mobile agent systems. The p Claimed as the next generation programming paradigm, mobile agent technology has attracted extensive interests in recent years. However, up to now, limited research efforts have been devoted to the performance study of mobile agent system and most of these researches focus on agent behavior analysis in that models are hard to apply to mobile agent systems. To bridge the gap, a new performance evaluation model derived from operation mechanisms of mobile agent platforms is proposed. Details are discussed for the design of companion simulation software, which can provide the system performance such as response time of platform to mobile agent. Further findings is followed on the determination of model parameters. Finally comparison is made between the model-based simulation results and measurement-based real performance of mobile agent systems. and designed software are effective in evaluating performance characteristics of mobile ag ent systems. The p