Mobile Agents for e-commerce

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Mobile Agents for e-commerce

• Rahul Jha
• Under the guidance of Prof. Sridhar Iyer

KR School of Information Technology , IIT Bombay
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Overview

• Mobile Agent applications in e-commerce
• Mobility Patterns and implementation strategies
• Quantitative performance evaluation of Voyager
• Evaluation of Voyager, Aglets and Concordia
• Our Prototype of e-commerce application using
  mobile agents

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e-commerce applications

• Involve
• Product search
• Order Placement and confirmations
• Negotiations
• Characterized by
• Large amount of data exchange
• Client specific services
• Require
• Real time interactions
• Disconnected (or low bandwidth) shopping

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Mobile Agent advantages

• Mobile agents (MA)
• A mobile agent is a program that can
  autonomously migrate between the various nodes of
  a network and perform computations on behalf of
  the user
• MA advantages
• reduce network usage
• faster response times
• add client-specified functionality to servers
• increase asynchrony between clients and servers
• introduce concurrency

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Mobility patterns and Implementation strategies
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Implementation strategies
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3
C
Client
2
3
4
5
6
1
1
4
Server
C
C
Mobile Agent
(a) Sequential Client Server
(b) Sequential Mobile Agent
Message exchange
Numbers along the arrows indicate the sequence of
messages./ MA movement.
1 2 3 4 5 6
2
2
2
1
1
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
C
C
(c) Parallel Client Server
(d) Parallel Mobile Agent
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Mobility Pattern Parameters

• Definitions
• Itinerary the set of sites that an MA has to
  visit
• static
• dynamic
• Order the order in which an MA visits sites in
  its itinerary.
• static
• dynamic

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Static Itinerary Static Order
H1
H2
H3
H4
H1
H2
H3
H4
Order
Itinerary
C
H1
H2
H3
H4

• Sequential CS
• Sequential MA
• Parallel CS
• Parallel MA

Applicable Implementation Strategies
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Static Itinerary Dynamic Order
?
H1
H2
H3
H4
H1
Order
Itinerary
C
H1
H2
H3
H4

• Sequential CS
• Sequential MA
• Parallel CS
• Parallel MA

Applicable Implementation Strategies
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Dynamic Itinerary
?
?
H1
H1
Order
Itinerary
C
H1
H2
H3
H4

• Sequential CS
• Sequential MA
• Parallel CS
• Parallel MA

Applicable Implementation Strategies
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Experimentation and results

• The e-commerce application
• A single client searching for information about a
  particular product from the catalog of several
  on-line stores
• We assume that the client requires a highly
  customized search which the on-line store does
  not support.

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Experimentation

• Experimental setup
• Voyager Framework for MA implementations
• Java socket based implementation for client
  server interaction
• On Pentium-III, 450 MHz workstations connected
  through a 10 Mbps LAN with typical student load

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Parameters
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Performance metric User Turnaround Time

• time elapsed between
• a user initiating a request and receiving the
  results.
• equals time taken for
• agent creation
• visit / collect catalogs
• processing time to extract information.

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Effect of catalog size on Turnaround Time
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processing 20ms
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processing 500ms
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processing 1000ms
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Observations

• Mobility patterns determine the implementation
  strategies
• Sequential CS most suitable where
• a small amount of information has to be retrieved
  from few remote information sources.
• Parallel implementations effective when
• processing information contributes significantly
  to the turnaround time.

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Observations

• Mobile agents out perform traditional approaches
  when
• When the cost of shipping MAs lt message exchange
  size.
• MAs scale effectively across the parameters of
  E-commerce application

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Evaluation of Voyager, Aglets and Concordia
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Qualitative Comparison
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Quantitative Evaluation Experiments

• Mobility pattern Product discovery

• Experimental setup Same as that for previous
  experiments.
• Performance metric User turnaround time

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Cost of message exchange
Number
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Cost of code shipment
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Observations

• Voyager supports almost the super set of
  functionalities and features as compared to
  Aglets and Concordia.
• Voyager being an ORB has advanced messaging
  support and hence performs much better than
  Aglets and Concordia.
• Cost of code shipment for Voyager is more than
  Concordia (both user RMI)
• Voyager is an ORB with mobility support
• Large set of functionalities supported by Voyager

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Our Prototype of e-commerce application using
mobile agents
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Architecture of Our Prototype Model
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Interaction among Components
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Conclusion

• Helps user with tedious repetitive job and time
  consuming activities.
• Faster and real time interacting at shops
• Reducing network load
• Support for disconnected operation.
• Introduce concurrency of operations
• Client specific functionalities at the shops

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Thank You