A component-level self-configuring personal agent platform for pervasive computing

Mobile agents have been widely used in distributed computing to take care of the task execution for the user. It is also suitable for mobile and pervasive computing. However, a pervasive computing environment is characterised by high diversity and dynamism, which gives rise to the requirement that a mobile agent executed in such environments has the self-configuring capability. In this paper, we study the problem, when an object providing a service enters the environment, how a mobile agent without prior knowledge about the object can interact with the service. We describe a method for the mobile agent to obtain the corresponding interaction codes and instantiate them for the interaction at runtime with minimal human involvement. We call this component-level self-configuration. Currently, no existing system renders a mobile agent with such capability. We propose a framework, which consists of a unified model for all the participating objects and mechanisms for a mobile agent to dynamically obtain interaction code and self-configuring it for execution. A prototype platform has been implemented and a preliminary performance study has also been carried out. Our experimental results show that the overhead caused by the component-level self-configuration is acceptable.