An Agent Based Service Inter-working Architecture for the Virtual Home Environment

Abstract

One of the major efforts for standardising of service capabilities rather than standardising the services in UMTS is to achieve service differentiation and system continuity. While pre-UMTS systems thrived on the ability to access services in a same manner when user roamed, these new deregulation efforts of services will pose some problems in provisioning of services across networks. The concept of the virtual home environment (VHE) addresses problems like this but does not rigidly specify how services can be deployed. This contribution will discuss how agent technology can be applied for designing a service provisioning architecture based on the VHE concept. More importantly, the paper will focus on the importance of service inter-working for supplementing service functionality and discuss how agent communication based on FIPA² ACL standard can be used to overcome this issue. Finally, the paper will discuss the design and implementation of a middleware known as a common communication module (CCM) used by service components on the network and the mobile nodes to perform ACL communication.

This work was partly funded by the European Commission as part of the ACTS project AC341 “Cameleon”. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not purport to represent the Cameleon consortium.

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agent (FIPA) is a non-profit organisation which is promoting the development of specification for generic agent technologies that maximise interoperability within and across agent based applications.