Twin Agents: network-assisted disconnected operation and distributed processing for mobile communication

Abstract

Mobile end nodes cannot achieve stable communication if they use the end-to-end communication model due to the instability of wireless links. Moreover, mobile nodes will always have lower performance than fixed nodes, so the mobile node user needs some assistants. Our solution is the Twin Agents architecture, a network-assisted distributed processing architecture for mobile nodes. Its main point is the establishment of a pair of agents, one runs on the mobile node, and the other is placed on a stable part of the network and acts as an alter ego of the mobile node. These agents support flexible and programmable disconnected operations, and offset the low performance of the mobile node and the wireless link. We also propose a programming model for applications that will run on Twin Agents.