Mobile Personal Agents for Smart Spaces

Mobile Personal Agents for Smart Spaces Iván Marsá-Maestre, Miguel A. López, Juan R. Velasco and Andres Navarro ICPS 2006 Lyon, France June 28th, 2006

Smart Environments Smart Environments • Acquire and apply knowledge about their inhabitants and their surroundings in order to adapt to them • Goals: generally, comfort and efficiency • Adapt the environment to suit user preferences • Reduce the effort needed to perform routine tasks • Adequate resource management –ecology-

SETH SETH: Smart EnvironmenT Hierarchy • A Hierarchy of Smart Spaces • Self-contained locations within the environment • Characterized by a set of devices DA, a set of services SA, and a given context CA • May be hierarchically arranged • Aggregation and inheritance rules for devices, services and context

SETH SETH: Smart EnvironmenT Hierarchy

SETH A Hierarchy of Smart Spaces city home restaurant workplace car second floor deskroom presentation room

SETH SETH Devices • Smart Space Agent Platform (SSAP) • Agent Platform • High-level agents • Agents controlling simple devices • Devices without Agents • Devices with Agents • Autonomous sensors/effectors • Identification Devices • Personal devices

SETH SETH Software Agents • Smart Space Coordination Agent (SSCA) • Device, agent and service management and discovery • Device agents • System Agents (including Context Agents) • Service Agents • Personal Agents (PA)

Mobile Personal Agents The Personal Agent • Intermediary between the user and the system

Mobile Personal Agents Personal Agent Mobility • Intermediary between the user and the system • Needs to be contacted at every user request • User mobility  Inter-platform communication increases • Solution: personal agents are mobile • Mobile personal agents • Associated to a Home Agent Platform (HAP) • Clones and moves when the user requests a service on another SSAP • When user leaves a SSAP moves to the ancestor SSAP • Possible problem: overload of top-level SSAPs • If the destination node is an ancestor of the HAP, it returns to the HAP

Mobile Personal Agents Personal Agent Mobility

Mobile Personal Agents city home monument Personal Agent Mobility

Mobile Personal Agents Personal Agent Mobility city home workplace second floor

Mobile Personal Agents Personal Agent Mobility city home workplace second floor deskroom

Simulations Simulation scenario • Example hierarchy tree • 10 Mbps Ethernet links in workplace buildings • 50 Mbps WAN at city level • ADSL (2Mbps downlink, 512 kbps uplink) for user residences

Simulations Simulation results

Conclusions Conclusions and future work • Hierarchical approach to service personalization in smart environments using mobile agents • Hierarchy  flexibility and scalability • Mobile agents  handle user mobility in an efficient way and without relying on personal devices • Open issues • New smart services • Adaptive mobility models • Security layer (specially mobile agent security)

Iván Marsá-Maestre ivmarsa@aut.uah.es Mobile Personal Agents for Smart Spaces A Contextual Ontology to provide Location-Aware Services and Interfaces in Smart Environments

Mobile Personal Agents for Smart Spaces