Agent-based middleware to access multimedia services in a Grid environment

The increasing development of wireless devices and the diffusion of mobile computing require big efforts in order to satisfy the users’ needs. The management of advanced services such as the multimedia streaming involves several operations like QoS management, location and context awareness, tailoring, load balancing, power saving and so on. This paper presents the very complex and challenging issue to design a comprehensive middleware to allow mobile wireless user to access advanced services available in the wired part of the network. The overall middleware is distributed on the areas involved in wireless service provisioning (Wireless Network, Wired Network, Access Points) and has been implemented by using the mobile agent paradigm. In order to improve the management of wired resources the use of the Grid Computing paradigm has been investigated. A testbed has been developed that is used as an experimental environment to provide mobile users the access to multimedia streaming flows while moving and at a given level of QoS.