Mobile Agents: A Key for Effective Pervasive Computing

The recent evolution of small-sized electronic devices and their growing computational power turned the concept of pervasive computing into a reality not very distant in the future. Researchers are currently developing systems to provide the basic software infrastructure needed for next generation pervasive computing environments. In these systems, however, the possibilities offered by the use of mobile agents are being overlooked. In this paper, we argue that mobile agents, due to its inherent flexibility, can bring a number of benefits to pervasive computing systems. Furthermore, we propose a novel architecture that uses mobile agents to perform three common tasks of pervasive computing more efficiently: system adaptation, component updates and QoS negotiation.