Transcript Agents
Invited Talk MCAP - agent-based service solutions for mobile networks Bremen, Januar 2001 Jens Hartmann Senior Researcher Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland GmbH Germany [email protected] 1 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 [email protected] Several contributing disciplines Artificial Intelligence Distributed Systems Object Technology 2 Agents - a buzzword for everything? Network Management Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages User Interface Distributed Systems Robotic Agent [email protected] 3 Why Agent Technology? Shortcomings of 2nd Generation Mobile Networks Applications of Agent Technology • Limited Bandwidth • Home Services not always • Task Delegation available (e.g. Search Machines) • Low Processing • Service Personalization • Adaptability to Networks Power of Terminals • Simple User Interfaces • High Connectivity Costs [email protected] and Terminals • Virtual Home Environment • Fixed Mobile Convergence • Open Architecture and Networks 4 Application Scenario: Banking & Payment Complex transactions Mobile User Application Server Service Provider Why M-Commerce with Agents? • Internet Boom • Personalized Services • Network and Terminal Independence [email protected] 5 Application Scenario: Intelligent Shopping Provider Network WAP Terminal Product:_____ Price:_______ Distance:__km etc. ____ SQL Products WAP Gateway Merchant 1 Internet - WML pages - list of merchants SQL WAP / Agent Server SQL Products Merchant n [email protected] 6 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 [email protected] 7 Agent-based M-Commerce solution Internet/ Agents/ SQL Backbone M-Commerce Agent Platform (MCAP) Agents/WAP/XML over GSM/GPRS/Bluetooth/WLAN/IRDA [email protected] 8 Information retrieval with agents Mobile Agent Merchant A Merchant C MCAP Merchant B Merchant D Stationary Agent Merchant A Merchant C MCAP Merchant B Merchant D -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 [email protected] 9 M-Commerce: A comparison Time for product search in [ms] stationary agents are faster mobile agents are more complex XML-interface creates additional delay 3000 2500 2000 MSA+XML 1500 MSA SSA 1000 500 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Measurements [email protected] 10 [email protected] FIRST THREE BEST SMART 11 M-commerce: MCAP performance vs. merchants [email protected] 12 Impact of mobile and stationary agents 909.6 20 Data Volume [kbyte] 18 16 14 12 MSA 10 SSA 8 6 4 2 0 FIRST [email protected] THREE BEST SMART 13 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 the entry point for m-commerce services Effective data reduction through WMLC XML is a sensible interface to create flexible and extendable mobile agents [email protected] 14 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) [email protected] 15 Mobile agents - outlook With today’s 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. [email protected] 16