FIPA-OS Agent Platform for Small-Footprint Devices

The trend is towards having smaller and smaller mobile devices, also called small-footprint devices, allowing nomadic users to access the same services as with the static computers from virtually anywhere and at any time. The idea of having software agents running on smallfootprint mobile devices sounds an attractive way of delivering services for nomadic users. One of the biggest problems is that the current agent platforms are designed to run on computers with a lot of resources, e.g. CPU power and memory. This paper discusses the problem area of having a FIPA-OS agent platform running on a small-footprint devices. Our views are based on experiences of running a FIPA-OS agent platform on Java-enabled smallfootprint devices. The experiments were conducted using Casio Cassiopeia E-115 and Psion Series 5mx. Our results clearly show that without any optimizations FIPA-OS is not suited to run on small-footprint devices.