Mobile Agent Middleware for Multimedia Services

Over the past few years, there has been an increased trend of developing applications using mobile agent paradigm. Among them, there are applications that interact with mobile devices; these mobile devices provide connectivity to larger number of users. This increasing number of mobile devices identifies challenges in term of service provision to these devices as they have limited resources in term of computation and storage. In addition to this service, providers also face the challenge of heterogeneity in term of mobile device specifications over a large spectrum of available mobile devices. This paper presents a solution based on mobile agent and introduces the concept of middleware for dynamically discovered, location dependent multimedia services for mobile devices. Mobile agents act on behalf of mobile device over a fixed network performing necessary actions in terms of configuration/reconfiguration, communication, downloading multimedia to mobile device and quality of service handling. Design of a prototype and its implementation has been presented to verify the solution proposed.