subagent

Noun

subagent (plural subagents)

1. A person employed by an agent to transact the whole, or a part, of the business entrusted to the latter.
   • Where a subagent is appointed pursuant to actual or implied authority from the principal the principal is liable directly to the subagent for his compensation .1915, Harry Noyes Greene, William Mark McKinney, David Shephard Garland, American and English Annotated Cases, page 22
   • Where a subagent is appointed by authority of the principal, the subagent is, so far as relates to third persons, the agent of the principal, and the acts of the subagent are binding upon the principal;1918, Israel A. Washburne, Principles of the Law of Contracts, page 37
2. An autonomous process that is launched by and communicates with another agent in order to handle part of the task that is the objective of that other agent.
   • On a UNIX system, the coordinating agent and subagent processes will have different names.2003, Dwaine Snow, Thomas X. Phan, Advanced DBA Certification Guide and Reference for DB2 Universal Database v8
   • An SNMP subagent supports its own MIB, which might be an RFC-architected MIV, or might be a proprietary (referered to as enterprise-specific) MIB. For example, a TCP/IP subagent would most likely support the IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, and Interface groups defined in RFC 1213.2006, Lydia Parziale, Dr. Wei Liu, Carolyn Matthews, TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview, page 632