A mobile agent infrastructure for the mobility support
Paolo Bellavista, Antonio Corradi, Cesare Stefanelli · 2000
The mobility of terminals and users is a crucial issue in the open global system represented by the Intemet.Supporting terminal and user mobility requires a middleware infrastmcture capable of efficiently answering the needs of scalable resource discovery, of security and interoperability, of Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring and adaptation.Some proposals address mobility at the network level and some others focus on application-level solutions.By following the latter approach, the paper proposes the adoption of the mobile agent technology to model and implement mobility.In particular, the paper concentrates on the components and modules implemented in the SOMA mobile agent programming framework to specifically support terminal and user mobility.The SOMA tracing and discovery system extends the SOMA basic naming service to identify and keep track of all mobile entities in the environment.The SOMA QoS adaptation support exploits the functionality of the SOMA monitoring tools and permits to dynamically adjust service provision in response to the changing network and nodes conditions.These features are integrated in a mobility add-on module that pursues also the goals of security and interoperability when moving users and roaming terminals.