Adaptive mobile access to context-aware services

With the advances of wireless communication, mobile computing will become ubiquitous. This will lend to adaptive computing, where electronic services support the user anytime, anywhere and in every form. Adaptive services must take the user requirements, the current geolocation, the situation he or she is facing, the available network connection and the associated usage costs into account. This very much relies on flexible and adaptive system mechanisms in the network. This paper presents the results of the ACTS AMASE (Agent-based Mobile Application Support Environment) project which has adapted a mobile agent system for the use in wireless networks to support mobile users. We concentrate on issues related to making mobile agent-based services aware to the context of the user. We examine (a) a mechanism that allows agents to adapt their behavior to the current situation in the wireless network, and (b) a system mechanism that automatically adapts agent execution to the given context. Finally, we present an overview of the current Europe-wide AMASE testbed and the realized application.