Design of Agent-Based Middleware for Flexible Connection Control( Software Agent and Its Applications)

Controlling connections between operating networks in an extranet according to various requests from users or applications creates a huge load for network administrators. In response to this problem, the authors herein propose a type of agent-based middleware for dynamically configuring and providing network services based on requests assigned from applications. In addition, they describe a method of designing this agent-based middleware and construct an experimental system that incorporates it to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique through experiments using the system. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(10): 50–62, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI 10.1002sscj.10656