1. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 1 Jens Hartmann Senior Researcher Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland GmbH Germany Bremen, Januar 2001 Invited Talk MCAP - agent-based service solutions for mobile networks

2. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 2 The idea of agents is not new! the age old dream of intelligent robots asynchronous processing tasks decentralisation of control Agents - the good old dream Several contributing disciplines Artificial Intelligence Distributed Systems Object Technology

3. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 3 Agent Artificial Intelligence User Interface Programming Languages Network Management Agents - a buzzword for everything? Robotic Distributed Systems

4. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 4 Shortcomings of 2nd Generation Mobile Networks Limited Bandwidth Home Services not always available Low Processing Power of Terminals Simple User Interfaces High Connectivity Costs Applications of Agent Technology Task Delegation (e.g. Search Machines) Service Personalization Adaptability to Networks and Terminals Virtual Home Environment Fixed Mobile Convergence Open Architecture and Networks Why Agent Technology?

5. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 5 Why M-Commerce with Agents? Internet Boom Personalized Services Network and Terminal Independence Service Provider Complex transactions Application Server Mobile User Application Scenario: Banking & Payment

6. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 6 Application Scenario: Intelligent Shopping WAP Gateway Merchant 1 WAP / Agent Server Merchant n Internet Provider Network WAP Terminal Product:_____ Price:_______ Distance:__km etc. ____ SQL - WML pages - list of merchants Products

7. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 7 M-Commerce  M-Commerce is the driver for mobile data services  current activities are concentrating around payment solutions  for a retrieval and shopping scenario  user interfaces have to be simple  number of interactions with the user should be reduced by the use of agents  adaptation of output to different end-systems  data over radio interfaces should decrease  WAP offers with WBXML an efficient and ease to use compression mechanism

8. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 8 M-Commerce Agent Platform (MCAP) Agents/WAP/XML over GSM/GPRS/Bluetooth/WLAN/IRDA Internet/ Backbone Agents/ SQL Agent-based M-Commerce solution

9. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 9 -Data (SQL) -Mobile Agent Mobile AgentStationary Agent MCAP Merchant A Merchant B Merchant C Merchant D MCAP Merchant A Merchant B Merchant C Merchant D MCAP creates list of merchants Mobile agents move from host to host Mobility enables filtering data locally Mobile agents generate a higher base load (data volume and processing time); load is distributed among all hosts, thus the increase of the MCAP load is less critical Information retrieval with agents

10. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 10 M-Commerce: A comparison stationary agents are faster mobile agents are more complex XML-interface creates additional delay

11. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 11 BESTSMART THREEFIRST

12. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 12 M-commerce: MCAP performance vs. merchants

13. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 13 Impact of mobile and stationary agents

14. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 14 Summary Small amounts of data (3 to 5 kbyte) are sufficient Expected service times will around 2 minutes Simple queries will be best achieved by RPCs Mobile agents are advantageous for complex queries Mobile agents are also very helpful in respect to load balancing (processing power of the MCAP) GPRS and UMTS are designed for packet-oriented applications the air interface will remain as bottleneck of the system M-Commerce services will benefit from volume-based billing High penetration of WAP phones is the entry point for m-commerce services Effective data reduction through WMLC XML is a sensible interface to create flexible and extendable mobile agents

15. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 15 the agent paradigm is applicable for multiple application segments (modelling) service roaming could be achieved through mobile agents (flexibility, personalisation) performance evaluations have shown that mobile agents have advantageous when it comes to multiple data transmission and complex transactions (reduction of network traffic) mobile agents are well-suited for mobile applications for wireless networks and rare resources (asynchronous task execution) Conclusions concerning mobile agents

16. Jens.Hartmann@ericsson.com 16  With today’s platforms, mobile agent technology faces open issues such as security, scalability and disconnected operations. to offer new value-added services (FMC) to reduce time-to-market to reduce development and maintenance costs and change the nature of service provisioning.  In the near future, however, mobile agent technology will solve many problems efficiently, and are well-designed for packet-switched networks. Mobile agent technology will allow Mobile agents - outlook