Supporting nomadic agent-based applications in the FIPA agent architecture

A high variety of Quality of Service (QoS) in data transmission over wireless networks creates challenges that have not been adequately addressed in today's Internet-based services. Whereas today's distributed applications may result in treating rapid and extreme changes in QoS as failures, in the nomadic environment comprising wireless data communications we consider them as a usual case. Therefore, the complexity of data transmission should be hidden from the nomadic user and applications and managed by an intelligent middleware. In this paper we present an agent-based middleware providing means for building adaptive applications for nomadic users. Our model introduces two agents for monitoring and controlling the wireless link, a QoS ontology and an efficient way for agent communication over the wireless link. Monitoring and controlling of the link is carried out by Monitor Agent and Control Agent. The ontology defines a QoS terminology and methods to access the services of monitor and control agents. The efficient way for agent communication consists of a bit-efficient encoding of agent messages and a message transport protocol designed for wireless links. Our implementation is built on top of FIPA-compliant agent platform.