Handheld medical devices negotiating for reconfigurable resources using agents

The nomadic nature of medical professionals can hinder their ability to access efficient medical tools at locations of their choice. The portability and connectivity characteristics of handheld medical devices can help resolve this issue. However, these handhelds have a physical size constraint inhibiting their system resource capacity. This limits their ability to support a wide range of medical applications effectively. Reconfigurable hardware incorporated within distributed servers has vast potential to improve the system performance and versatility of mobile medical devices. To fully realise the benefit of networked reconfigurable resources, portable computers need an effective middleware to enable them to efficiently utilise surrounding adaptive servers. Agent technology is a sophisticated and intelligent middleware framework that can empower handheld medical devices to exploit networked reconfigurable hardware resources. This paper outlines a deployment strategy that incorporates a high-level protocol to facilitate mobile device computational offloading. This protocol is based on efficient cooperation and negotiation between agents in a distributed medical environment. An experimental demonstrator system is shown and simulation results of the negotiation technique are presented.