Mobile Agents for Discovering and Accessing Services in Nomadic Environments

摘要

Discovering and accessing distributed services in the Internet from portable devices in nomadic environments is of increasing interest for mobile users. But it is challenged by the deficiencies of wireless communication, heterogeneous environments, and user mobility. To surmount these obstacles, we propose a mobile agent based service architecture CHAPLET which provides an integrated, uniform, and general-purpose middleware platform to enable mobile users to discover and to utilize services efficiently and conveniently. The distinct features of CHAPLET include asynchronous service look-up, flexible service selection, dynamic configuration and adaptation, and interoperability with heterogeneous service environments. In this paper, the concept and architecture of the CHAPLET platform is presented, followed by the system design and implementation, as well as experimental results.