Agent Tutorial

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Invited Talk MCAP - agent-based
servicesolutions for mobile networks
Bremen, Januar 2001
Jens Hartmann Senior Researcher Ericsson Eurolab
Deutschland GmbH Germany
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Agents - the good old dream

• The idea of agents is not new!
• the age old dream of intelligent robots
• asynchronous processing tasks
• decentralisation of control

• Several contributing disciplines
• Artificial Intelligence
• Distributed Systems
• Object Technology

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Agents - a buzzword for everything?
Agent
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Why Agent Technology?

• Shortcomings of 2nd Generation
  Mobile Networks
• Limited Bandwidth
• Home Services not always available
• Low Processing Power of Terminals
• Simple User Interfaces
• High Connectivity Costs

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Application Scenario Banking Payment
Complex transactions
Application Server
Mobile User
Service Provider
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Application Scenario Intelligent Shopping
WAP Terminal
Product_____ Price_______ Distance__km etc.
____
Products
WAP Gateway
Merchant 1
- WML pages - list of merchants
WAP / Agent Server
Products
Merchant n
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M-Commerce

• M-Commerce is the driver for mobile data
  services
• current activities are concentrating around
  payment solutions
• for a retrieval and shopping scenario
• user interfaces have to be simple
• number of interactions with the user should be
  reduced by the use of agents
• adaptation of output to different end-systems
• data over radio interfaces should decrease
• WAP offers with WBXML an efficient and ease to
  use compression mechanism

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Agent-based M-Commerce solution

M-Commerce Agent Platform (MCAP)
Internet/Backbone
Agents/ SQL
Agents/WAP/XML over GSM/GPRS/Bluetooth/WLAN/IRDA
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Information retrieval with agents
Mobile Agent
Stationary Agent
-Data (SQL)
-Mobile Agent

• MCAP creates list of merchants
• Mobile agents move from host to host
• Mobility enables filtering data locally
• Mobile agents generate a higher base load (data
  volume and processing time) load is distributed
  among all hosts, thus the increase of the MCAP
  load is less critical

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M-Commerce A comparison

• stationary agents are faster
• mobile agents are more complex
• XML-interface creates additional delay

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(No Transcript)
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M-commerce MCAP performance vs. merchants
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Impact of mobile and stationary agents
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Summary

• Small amounts of data (3 to 5 kbyte) are
  sufficient
• Expected service times will around 2 minutes
• Simple queries will be best achieved by RPCs
• Mobile agents are advantageous for complex
  queries
• Mobile agents are also very helpful in respect to
  load balancing (processing power of the MCAP)
• GPRS and UMTS are designed for packet-oriented
  applications
• the air interface will remain as bottleneck of
  the system
• M-Commerce services will benefit from
  volume-based billing
• High penetration of WAP phones is theentry point
  for m-commerce services
• Effective data reduction through WMLC
• XML is a sensible interface to create flexible
  and extendable mobile agents

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Conclusions concerning mobile agents

• the agent paradigm is applicable for multiple
  application segments (modelling)
• service roaming could be achieved through mobile
  agents (flexibility, personalisation)
• performance evaluations have shown that mobile
  agents have advantageous when it comes to
  multiple data transmission and complex
  transactions (reduction of network traffic)
• mobile agents are well-suited for mobile
  applications for wireless networks and rare
  resources (asynchronous task execution)

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Mobile agents - outlook

• ?
• With todays platforms, mobile agent technology
  faces open issues such as security, scalability
  and
• disconnected operations.

? In the near future, however, mobile
agent technology will solve many problems
efficiently, and are well-designed for
packet-switched networks. Mobile agent
technology will allow

• to offer new value-added services (FMC)
• to reduce time-to-market
• to reduce development and maintenance costs

and change the nature of service provisioning.