Mobile Agent Middlewares for Context-Aware Applications

Wireless communications and the Internet are converging towards an integrated scenario where both traditional and novel services should be ubiquitously accessible, independently of the mobility of users, terminals, resources and service components. Mobility-enabled service provisioning introduces several challenging issues to address: from client/server location change at provision time, to wide heterogeneity of access terminals, and to unpredictable modifications in accessible resources. In this complex scenario, two main guidelines are recently emerging: the need for novel middleware solutions to support service development and deployment, and the necessity of full visibility of the context, intended as the logical set of accessible resources depending on client location, access terminal capabilities, and system/service management policies, to adapt service provisioning to specific runtime conditions. The chapter discusses and motivates the suitability of the Mobile Agent (MA) technology to implement novel context-aware middlewares for mobile computing, mainly because of the MA properties of mobility, asynchronicity, decentralization, and location awareness. In addition, the chapter gives an extensive overview of the state-of-the-art research activities about MA-based supports for mobile computing, and especially about context-aware ones, in order to point out, through system/prototype exemplifications, the main lessons learned and the primary directions of the on-going research work. 1 Mobile Computing and Context Awareness The wide spreading of mobile computing is changing the way to develop, deploy and expect to access Internet services. Nomadic users who disconnect from the network to re-connect to a new point of attachment after a time interval and mobile terminals that continuously roam in the network without suspending the on-going service sessions introduce new challenging issues in service design. Recent advances in wireless networking and the enlarging market of

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