Usage of mobile agent in configuring WPANs

A number of mobile smart devices such as PDAs and sophisticated mobile phones are already available, and the trend is set to continue with more devices becoming wirelessly connectable and communicable. This implies that Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) are likely to become commonplace in the near future. Since a WPAN is personal and likely to be used by one user at a time, it makes sense and would also be desirable for it to be automatically configured or customised for the current user. Conventional methods of storing and activating user settings are usually designed for configuring a single workstation and thus cannot be applied to a WPAN, a network of devices that may or may not be computers. Additionally, an inherent nature of a WPAN is the ad-hoc connectivity of its devices, which conventional methods of configuration were not designed to address. In this project, mobile agent technology was used to solve the configuration problem. A study was done on mobile agent technologies, and the Aglet system was selected for use. Research was also done on wireless networking technologies suitable for WPAN, and Bluetooth was used to connect up a simple WPAN in this project. The system worked well and was able to configure the remote PC to the desired settings in about a minute or less.