Mobile Intelligence

14.3 REFLECTIVE MOBILE AGENTS WITHIN SMART OFFICES

As seen in the scenarios above, we propose that the smart environment takes care of storing and sending the personal information. The person is always accompanied by a mobile virtual object in the smart environment. So location-based services adapted to personal profiles can be offered. Certainly the ubiquitous system could be realized as a server-centric approach. But concerning personal movements and data, this would lead to a big-brother-is-watching-you scenario, where entities that gain access to the server would have access to all personal information. Regarding smart environments, a central server could rapidly become a bottleneck because of the amount of clients and services running on the system. Moreover, a failure on the server would endanger the whole system.

The paradigm of mobile agents ideally fits into the decentralized approach. The mobile agent constitutes a virtual reflection of the user. Reflective agents accompany persons in the smart environment and carry user-specific data. Employees have their personal reflective agent, which resides in the environment and contains data about the employee. These data consist of basic user information like name, office room, and so on, and security data like private and public keys, user names, and passwords of the owner used for communication, data security, and access operations. Furthermore, the agent stores context information belonging to the user and updates these data ...