Ad-Hoc On-Demand Communication System based on Mobile Agents

Recently, long-range wireless networks such as cellular networks, and short-range wireless communication devices such as IrDA, Wireless LAN(IEEE802.11), and Bluetooth become popular. In this paper, we introduce the concept of ad-hoc communication which is the short-range wireless communication between the information devices that happen to meet each other. We clarify the characteristics of ad-hoc communication and discuss the difficulties of on-demand communications. We propose a mobile agent system for supporting ad-hoc on-demand communication by the full use of both long and short-range network devices. We implement the mobile agent system named MAGNET and we also develop communication several prototype systems which implement ad-hoc on-demand communication. These systems exemplify the usefulness of the framework.