Agent Support for Personal Mobility

T he advent of mobile telecommunication systems has brought the term user mobility to next-generation telecommunication network research and design. User mobility implies two things: terminal mobility—the ability of the network to locate a mobile terminal—and personal mobility— the ability of users to access defined services from any terminal in the network, while maintaining their personal environment settings. Many researchers are working on new telecommunication technologies to support both terminal and personal mobility; however, the increasing popularity of laptops and PDAs necessitates the introduction of user mobility to existing wide telematic environments, such as the Internet. Several research projects, such as Mobile IP,1 are dealing with terminal mobility, but there are few exploring personal mobility. Although some browsers, like Netscape Navigator, already support a kind of personal mobility called roaming user access,2 it is not transparent; each time the user changes working terminal, the installed browser must be reconfigured and restarted.