Mobile & Pervasive Computing at the University of Florida

aZIMAs - almost Zero Infrastructure Mobile Agents

Overview

Mobile Agents are not yet pervasive on the Internet due to the lack of a suitable infrastructure that would facilitate their existence. Existing mobile agent systems need heavy infrastructure that lacks interoperability if deployed on the Internet. We propose aZIMA, a framework that will enable the execution of lightweight mobile agents on the Internet and remove some of the constraints imposed by the existing systems. aZiMA uses existing protocols like HTTP to achieve code mobility. This framework is built by adding a minimal infrastructure layer over existing web servers. By incorporating mobile agents with web servers, the pervasiveness of the later will be leveraged and will make mobile agents equally pervasive.

The aZIMAs Mobile Agent System

The framework that we are developing is based on the Apache Web Server. Apache is chosen as it is open source, modular and is easy to enhance. The framework consists of an enhanced Apache Web Server that allows the execution of lightweight mobile agents. The web server will be capable of receiving mobile agents, launching them in the visited domain, and sending them to another destination when the mobile agent decides to move. The agents are Java based so the web server will use the JVM present in the machine to provide the required runtime environment for the execution of mobile agents at that particular site. The system will also implement modules that will take care of various security issues and resource allocation/leasing problems that need to be handled when or before mobile agents visit a web server. The objective of this project is to implement a simple yet secure and robust framework built on our modified version of the Apache server that enables the deployment of lightweight mobile agents on the Internet.

WAPM: Web Agents Programming Model based on aZIMAs

With the ever-growing Internet, distributed applications are gaining popularity. Going "online" to browse, to send/receive emails is an integral part of our daily lives. In fact, the majority of Internet users rely on email and web browsers as the de-facto tools for collaboration. Such popular tools, however, provide limited and inefficient mechanisms for collaboration, especially when several collaborators and resources are involved. Surprisingly, collaboration tools such as NetMeeting and Netscape Collabra are only used in limited applications despite their rich collaboration support. What is lacking is an invisible infrastructure that extends email and web browsing tools - to which most Inter-net users are accustomed and addicted - to become intuitive interfaces of a full-fledged Web collaboration system. We are developing WAPM, a Web Agent Pro-gramming Model that uses mobile agents as the tool for coordination and de-scribes a model that uses familiar tools such as the web and email for effective asynchronous collaboration. The mobile agents are based on the aZIMAs framework.

People

Dr. Sumi Helal
Amar Nalla
Vidya Renganarayanan
Subramanian Arumugam

Publications

Subramanian Arumugam, Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal, Amar Nalla, "aZIMAs: Web Mobile Agent System," Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Agents (MA'02), Barcelona, Spain , October 22-25, 2002 (pdf)
Amar Nalla, Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal and Vidya Renganarayanan, "aZIMAs: Almost Zero Infrastructure Mobile Agents System," Proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), Orlando, Florida, March 2002 (pdf)
Vidya Renganarayanan, Amar Nalla and Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal, "Internet Agents for Effective Collaboration," Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Agents for Telecommunication Applications (MATA'2002), Barcelona, Spain, October 22-24, 2002 (pdf)