Using cooperative mobile agents to monitor distributed and dynamic environments

Monitoring the changes in data values obtained from the environment (e.g., locations of moving objects) is a primary concern in many fields, as for example in the pervasive computing environment. The monitoring task is challenging from a double perspective. First and foremost, the environment can be highly dynamic in terms of the rate of data changes. Second, the monitored data are often not available from a single computer/device but are distributed; moreover, the set of data providers can change along the course of time. Therefore, obtaining a global snapshot of the environment and keeping it up-to-date is not easy, especially if the conditions (e.g., network delays) change.In this article, a decentralized, loose, and fault-tolerant monitoring approach based on the use of mobile agents is described. Mobile agents allow easy tracking of the involved computers, carrying the monitoring tasks to wherever they are needed. A deadline-based mechanism is used to coordinate the cooperative agents, which strive to perform their continuous tasks in time while considering data as recent as possible, constantly adapting themselves to new environmental conditions (changing communication and processing delays). This approach has been successfully used in a real environment and experiments were carried out to prove its feasibility and benefits.     

Location-dependent queries in mobile contexts: distributed processing using mobile agents

With the current advances of mobile computing technology, we are witnessing an explosion in the development of applications that provide mobile users with a wide range of services. In this paper, we present a system that supports distributed processing of continuous location-dependent queries in mobile environments. The system that we propose presents the following main advantages: 1) it is a general solution for the processing of location-dependent queries in scenarios where not only the users issuing queries, but also other interesting objects can move; 2) it performs an efficient processing of these queries in a continuous way; 3) it is especially well adapted to environments where location data are distributed in a network and processing tasks can be performed in parallel, allowing a high scalability; and 4) it optimizes wireless communications. We use mobile agents to carry the processing tasks wherever they are needed. Thus, agents are in charge of tracking the location of interesting moving objects and refreshing the answer to a query efficiently. We evaluate the usefulness of the presented proposal showing that the system achieves a good precision and scales up well.     

Using semantic techniques to access web data

Nowadays, people frequently use different keyword-based web search engines to find the information they need on the web. However, many words are polysemous and, when these words are used to query a search engine, its output usually includes links to web pages referring to their different meanings. Besides, results with different meanings are mixed up, which makes the task of finding the relevant information difficult for the users, especially if the user-intended meanings behind the input keywords are not among the most popular on the web.