Policy-driven personalized multimedia services for mobile users

This paper proposes an agent-based service provisioning system for mobile users. It describes a set of cooperative agents distributed over different sites that work together to provide personalized services for mobile users over the Internet. Users moving outside the office are able to maintain an off ice-like environment at home, or at temporary locations such as a meeting at another company, a business trip, or a hotel. Agents representing the end-users and the system agents engage in a negotiation process to facilitate access to personalized services at other sites. This access is obtained in accordance with the users' home policies as well as those at their current location. An Adaptive Service Presentation agent is used to adapt the service presentation to the capabilities of the users' workstations, laptops, phones, PDAs, or other devices. This work is conducted in Canada as part of the Mobile Agent Alliance project involving the University of Ottawa, the National Research Council, and the Mitel Corporation.