Agent-based banking transactions & information retrieval – What about performance issues?

For almost all applications within the telecommunication area speed and quality of data transfer is a very important factor. A main reason for using mobile agents in the telecommunication world is that there is a potential for better performance. In particular for mobile telecommunication networks like GSM, mobile agent technology can have considerable advantages. This is based on the fact that a GSM user has a relatively narrow bandwidth at his disposal, and that the connections are not always reliable. This is the case when the application does not need a permanent connection and the amount of data is relatively small. In order to verify these statements, an analytical performance model for mobile agents was derived. In order to test the performance model on a real application, measurements on an HBCI-based homebanking service for mobile agents [1] were carried out. In addition an optimisation strategy was defined and evaluated for an information retrieval service [2].