Integration of Web Services & Mobile Agents in Distributed Systems

Web services are widely used in current web based business applications, and form basis for emerging frameworks in all types of computing platforms. Current mobile agent systems implement similar mechanisms for service description, invocation and discovery. The research technique proposed in this book provides with a solution to open up the usage of mobile agent systems via the bridge of emerging Web Services (WS) standard technology to achieve interoperability. We have developed integration architecture, called "Web Service Mobile Integration" (WSMI), with twofold goal of exporting mobile agent functions with a web service interface and of simplifying access to legacy web service components from any mobile agent system. This promotes the uniform access to different mobile agent system functions, independently of the specific mobile agent implementation. We have thoroughly evaluated the Web Service Mobile Integration prototype performance, by comparing its functions with similar non-web service based facilities.