Realizing nomadic communication with mobile agents: strategies and their evaluation

The future nomadic customer will want to make requests according to his personal service profile and to be reachable under the same number, no matter to what terminal he is currently registered and to which provider he is currently attached. Unfortunately, the TINA service architecture does not provide satisfactory solutions for supporting nomadic communication up to now. The paper compares two strategies for realizing nomadic communication in TINA-compliant networks. Following the first approach, each customer is associated with a home domain where customer-related resources like the user agent are executed. In the alternative approach, the resources are modeled as mobile agents that follow the customer through the fixed network part. The presented strategies are analyzed and compared in a large-scale scenario using simulations. These simulations are based on a mathematical model that considers the movement and call behavior of customers. Furthermore, to enable the deployment of mobile agents in TINA systems, an agent platform is presented that has been developed in the AMASE project.