Facility provision using mobile agents

In our opinion, a mobile user should be able to move seamlessly between networked sites on the Internet without having to care about how the same kind of facility is offered at different sites. We look at how mobile agent technology may be used to support user mobility. In our solution, a mobile agent travels ahead of the mobile user and therefore has the ability to prepare for the arrival of a mobile user at a visiting site. Our mobile agent will discover the facilities the mobile user wants to use. The mobile agent will bring along the mobile users personal preferences regarding e.g. the look-and-feel of the facilities. Some available solutions which support user mobility (e.g Jini), provide proxies through which facilities may be utilized. This requires dedicated operating systems (OS) or rigorous infrastructures at the mobile computing entity (MCE) for piping the service requests from the MCE to the provided facility. The solution we provide, aims at enabling the MCE to utilize the provided facilities by adapting the MCE OS to the provided facilities.