Abstract not found

The ubiquity of wireless systems have ushered us into a new era of mobile computing. With the emergence of superior input/output, communication hardware and cheap data services, mobile phones have become a bed for offering new and exotic services. Superior GUI and remote connectivity make mobile phones and PDAs good candidates for data collection, but lacking battery life and computational prowess, they are poor computational devices. We introduce a novel architecture that builds on agents on mobile phones as the front end and a service-oriented architecture composed of high performance devices as the back end. Agent-based computing, which has proved to be advantageous for desktops/servers, can also encompass handheld devices to provide us with new service management capabilities. In this thesis, we discuss a new service deployment strategy on mobile phones based on mobile agents. Mobile agent is an agent that can migrate from one node to the other node in the network while preserving its state. This solves the problem of introducing new services manually and provides the advantage of on-the-fly code updates for existing services. We also discuss the challenges of mobile agent development in Java, mainly introducing