Performance Evaluation of an Allocation Strategy for TINA Compliant Mobile Agents Supporting PCS in a Multi-retailer Environment

This paper presents a strategy for the support of Personal Communication Services in TINA-compliant systems through the use of mobile agents. The paper reflects the point of view of the EC/ACTS research project DOLMEN which has developed OSAM, an Open Service Architecture for fixed and Mobile environments. After introducing the principle of retailer federation in a multi-domain environment, the paper analyses how federation can be established to support the migration of agents acting on behalf of the user within the network. A strategy for mobile agent allocation is presented and its effectiveness is evaluated according to two different performance metrics: the signalling load on the network and the average response time for service requests.