A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Mobility Management in beyond 3G-Environments

Beyond 3G-environments are typically defined as environments that integrate different wireless and fixed access network technologies. In this paper, we address IP based Mobility Management (MM) in beyond 3G-environments with a focus on wireless access networks, motivated by the current trend of WiFi, GPRS, and UMTS networks. The GPRS and UMTS networks provide countrywide network access, while the WiFi networks provide network access in local areas such as city centres and airports. As a result, mobile end-users can be always on-line and connected to their preferred network(s), these network preferences are typically stored in a user profile. For example, an end-user who wishes to be connected with highest bandwidth could be connected to a WiFi network when available and fall back to GPRS when moving outside the hotspot area.\ud In this paper, we consider a combination of MM for legacy services (like web browsing, telnet, etc.) using Mobile IP and multimedia services using SIP. We assume that the end-user makes use of multi-interface terminals with the capability of selecting one or more types of access networks\ud based on preferences. For multimedia sessions, like VoIP or streaming video, we distinguish between changes in network access when the end-user is in a session or not in a session. If the end-user is not in a session, he or she needs to be able to start new sessions and receive invitations for new sessions. If the end-user is in a session, the session needs to be handed over to the new access network as seamless as possible from the perspective of the end-user. We propose an integrated but flexible solution to these problems that facilitates MM with a customizable transparency to applications and end-users

Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration

Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs. Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs

Delivering knowledge in the field: A telecommunications service provision and maintenance case

This paper proposes a novel approach to providing knowledge management services in a business process wherein field engineers are the main process actors, providing and maintaining telecommunications services. Cooperating multi-agents play a central role for the provision of knowledge management services by integrating heterogeneous systems to collect related knowledge for the execution of mobile tasks. The proposed system is expected to increase both the performance of the mobile workforce and customer satisfaction by supporting and encouraging knowledge sharing