Web Service Provisioning to Nomadic Users Using a Light Weight Multi Agent System

Abstract

The availability and usage of handheld devices have increased at an escalating rate over the past few years and so is the application development potential in the nomadic environment. Intelligent applications are needed to fulfill the requirements of information availability anywhere, anytime, in any format, and on any device. To design and develop such intelligent applications the use of Multi Agent System is becoming a target of many research activities. The resource limitations of handheld devices introduce challenges for designing communication protocols and generic service access infrastructures for nomadic environment. In order to address these challenges, there is a need for smart nomadic system architecture with the capability of tackling communication and interoperability issues between MAS and Web Services. Various approaches exist to bring personalized services to nomadic users using agent technology but a mechanism to gain access to generic Web Services from a handheld device is still a challenging research area. The core objective of our research effort is to provide generic Web Service access to nomadic users using FIPA compliant multi agent systems, to process information effectively and efficiently without using XML messages on a handheld device and to analyze the effect of compression techniques in the nomadic environment. In pursuit of such a system, we have proposed a middleware based mediator system architecture. We have developed a prototype system to validate the results using SAGE-Lite and Axis Web Server. We have compared the results of proposed system with JADE/Leap by analyzing encoding/decoding, transmission, and response time for XML based, string based, BE based, and resource efficient ACL messages.