Schemes for updating mobile service agents in virtual home environment

The virtual home environment (VHE) is a concept for service mobility. Several tool kits are under standardization for its realization. Beyond these tool kits, it is worth researching mobile agents. A few mobile agent based architectures have been proposed for VHE. In these architectures, mobile agents carry services and customized data and follow roaming end-users, by relocation or cloning. This paper focuses on how these agents and their clones are updated. It proposes two novel schemes for updating mobile service agents in VHE. The schemes rely on the agent's ability to notify a network entity of the changes made by end users to the customized data, and also on the agent's ability to update itself if requested. In the first scheme, the clones are updated remotely, whereas in the second scheme, an updating mobile agent tours all the clones to update them locally. We have derived requirements, articulated the schemes, built a prototype, and made measurements. The measurements indicate that the scheme where the network entity requests the updates directly performs better in most cases.