PDAgent: a platform for developing and deploying mobile agent-enabled applications for wireless devices

Mobile agents (MAs) can support mobile computing by carrying out tasks autonomously for a mobile user temporarily disconnected from the network. We describe PDAgent, a lightweight and highly portable platform for developing and deploying mobile agent-enabled applications on wireless handheld devices. Our approach offers the following advantages: (i) It does not require installing MA server on handheld devices and supports the adoption of any kind of mobile agent system at network hosts, while at the same time allow mobile users to have control of mobile agent activities; (ii) It support dynamic downloading of MA-enabled applications which can be made aware of and adaptive to the user's current context, and deploying the application to perform various tasks on behalf of the user over the wired network; (iii) It requires the minimum network connectivity and cost for users to deploy their applications. PDAgent provides APIs which allow developers to build new mobile applications on top of PDAgent. Example applications have been developed for PDAgent. We report on and discuss the results of experimental performance evaluations of PDAgent.