Agent-based multimedia communications on Internet

Abstract

Mobile agents have emerged as a new paradigm for communications and are proving to be more flexible than the average client in the client-server model. In the mobile agent architecture a script or program is sent to the remote severs to be executed, therefore taking advantage of the servers' resources and operating closer to the services. We describe an agent-based architecture suitable for the multimedia applications. This architecture is composed of user agent, service agent and a mobile agent that travels the network to perform tasks on behalf of a user or an application. The results gathered by the mobile agent are presented to the user by means of a rendering system based on a real-time transport protocol (RTP).