MASSIHN: a multi-agent architecture for intelligent home network service

The major design challenge in developing intelligent home network services is to organize effectively distributed and heterogeneous home devices. This article considers a mobile agent space based multi-agent architecture to meet this challenge. MASSIHN is a home network system that links consumer electronics and computing devices. The proposed Java based MASSIHN with mobile agents, may change the management functionality and the type of information collected to control various home network devices. MASSIHN supports TCP/IP, and can obtain data from MASS (mobile agent space system), encode the data into an XML document and then transfer the XML document to the server at the monitoring and management center. The end-users of MASSIHN can modify the parameters that govern their home appliances, and monitor their most recent home service states via the Internet from anywhere at any time. The business partners of MASSIHN can provide their customers with Internet services without constructing the backbone of a network, greatly reducing service cost. The proposed approach can execute MASSIHN applications from several commonly used devices such as PDAs and laptops.