Ahmed Karmouch

Mobile software agents: an overview

The anticipated increase in popular use of the Internet will create more opportunities in distance learning, electronic commerce, and multimedia communication, but it will also create more challenges in organizing information and facilitating its efficient retrieval. From the network perspective, there will be additional challenges and problems in meeting bandwidth requirements and network management. Many researchers believed that the mobile agent paradigm (mobile object) could propose several attractive solutions to deal with such challenges and problems. A number of mobile agent systems have been designed and implemented in academic institutions and commercial firms. However, few applications were found to take advantage of the mobile agent. Among the hurdles facing this emerging paradigm are concerns about security requirements and efficient resource management. This article introduces the core concepts of this emerging paradigm, and presents an account of current research efforts in the context of telecommunications. The goal is to provide the interested reader with a clear background of the opportunities and challenges this emerging paradigm brings about, and a descriptive look at some of the forerunners that are providing experimental technologies supporting this paradigm.

A temporal model for interactive multimedia scenarios

Many authoring tools let authors create scenarios, but very few let them create an active multimedia scenario that will not only play itself back, but will change course dynamically, depending on user interactions. Our temporal model provides a new way to represent asynchronous and synchronous temporal events, allowing authors to create scenarios that offer viewers seamless, transparent options.

Resource Discovery and Allocation in Network Virtualization

Network virtualization is considered an important potential solution to the gradual ossification of the Internet. In a network virtualization environment, a set of virtual networks share the resources of a common physical network although each virtual network is isolated from others. Benefits include increased flexibility, diversity, security and manageability. Resource discovery and allocation are fundamental steps in the process of creating new virtual networks. This paper surveys previous work on, and the present status of, resource discovery and allocation in network virtualization. We also describe challenges and suggest future directions for this area of research.

ACAI: agent-based context-aware infrastructure for spontaneous applications

The vision of people amalgamated with their surroundings in a spontaneous way created a new, context-aware era of human-computer interaction. The goal is to provide an infrastructure that can understand the current situation and act on that understanding. Context-awareness means that people, services and artifacts in an environment are integrated in a homogeneous manner in order to provide seamless service while still preserving privacy. To evolve from a passive state to an active pervasive state, the infrastructure must be able to support uniform context representation, to reason about context, to offer context-based service discovery, and to support a context management and communication protocol. In this paper, we present ACAI, an innovative Agent-based Context Aware infrastructure, equipped with the capabilities required to maintain spontaneous applications both locally and across different domains. We describe our ontology for modeling context that provides a common understanding of what context means and facilitates context inference. We propose a multi-agent framework that parallels the infrastructure design in order to assist in the development and runtime provisioning of spontaneous applications.

Vertical Mobility Management Architectures in Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Directions

Mobile users and applications are putting pressure on wireless network operators to improve the seamless handover of devices and services. Strong business competition for subscribers, along with the ever increasing availability of wireless networks will give nomadic and mobile users the opportunity, and systems the power, to make better handover decisions. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the literature on mobility management architectures for seamless handover of mobile users in heterogeneous networks. We describe the design rationale for selected architectures, with an in-depth analysis of their main goals, assumptions, and requirements. We also provide directions for further work in this field by highlighting the mandatory requirements and the features of future architectures. We then present a new architecture called Context-Aware Mobility Management System (CAMMS). CAMMS is a new cross-layer, context-aware and interactive approach to seamless handover of users and services. With that proposal, we identified the essential functional entities that must be part of future architectures.

Towards Autonomic Network Management: an Analysis of Current and Future Research Directions

Autonomic network management is an innovative vision promising new horizons of efficient networking systems free from human control. This promise has, thus far, ushered in enormous yet dispersed research contributions in both industry and academia. The work presented in this article aims at putting these efforts into perspective deriving a more holistic view of the literature in this area. We analyze the requirements and the main contributions for the building blocks of any autonomic network management system (ANMS). We then describe a coherent classification methodology to compare existing ANMS architectures. Based on this analysis, we suggest a reference framework and highlight some open challenges and describe new research opportunities.

Negotiating context information in context-aware systems

Context-aware environments must allow adaptive and autonomous access to context information. This multi-agent middleware uses a negotiation protocol and ontology model to make the environment more easily personalized at runtime and adapted and managed at provisioning time. In a pervasive environment, a wide range of devices and resources use heterogeneous networks to perform the tasks involved in spontaneous ad hoc communication. The environments infrastructure must therefore make available a rich set of computing capabilities and services at all times and in all locations in a transparent, integrated, and convenient way. Context provides perceptual information about the location and status of the people, places, and other devices in the environment.

Multimedia teleorchestra with independent sources: Part 1 -- temporal modeling of collaborative multimedia scenarios

Multimedia synchronization involving independent sources is a challenging issue imposed by the distributed multimedia applications. In our work, this issue is studied by investigating the teleorchestra application (remote multimedia presentation). In teleorchestration, among the data objects to be presented, relative and uncertain temporal requirements may be involved. “Fuzzy” presentation scenarios are thus generated. In this paper, we describe a temporal model that can handle these “fuzzy” scenarios that contain imprecise synchronization constraints, such as unknown object presentation durations and relative event occurring times. The model supports a distributed synchronization algorithm that can schedule the independent sources for the multimedia teleorchestration.

Mobility Aware Technologies and Applications

Web Agent Supporting Transport Layer Mobility.- A Network-Aware Truncating Module for Scalable Streams Saving Bandwidth for Overused Networks.- APHIDS++: Evolution of A Programmable Hybrid Intrusion Detection System.- Challenges in Modeling and Disseminating Context Information in Ambient Networks.- A Co-designed Hardware/Software Architecture for Augmented Materials.- A Simulation Model for the Dynamic Allocation of Network Resources in a Competitive Wireless Scenario.- An Adaptive Call Admission Control to Support Mobility in Next Generation Wireless Network.- Protecting Mobile Agent Loops.- ContextWare Support for Network and Service Composition and Self-adaptation.- Fixed Mobile Convergence: 3 Words, Many Perspectives.- Analysis of Movement Detection Process for IPv6 Mobile Nodes.- A Dynamic Resource Allocation Scheme for Providing QoS in Packet-Switched Cellular Networks.- Distributed Authorization Framework for Mobile Agents.- Adaptive Content for the Mobile User: A Policy-Based Approach.- An Authorisation and Privacy Framework for Context-Aware Networks.- Widget Integration Framework for Context-Aware Middleware.- Service Deployment in Active Networks Based on a P2P System.- Mobile Agents for Testing Web Services in Next Generation Networks.- A Secure Protocol for Mobile Agents in Hostile Environment.- A Cross-Layer Approach for Publish/Subscribe in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.- Towards Ambient Networks Management.- A Context-Aware Negotiation Model for M-Commerce.- Collection and Object Synchronization Based on Context Information.- Facilitating Context-Awareness Through Hardware Personalization Devices: The Simplicity Device.- Network Access Security Management (NASM) Model for Next Generation Mobile Telecommunication Networks.- Management of Aggregation Networks for Broadband Internet Access in Fast Moving Trains.- Design and Implementation of an Open IMS Core.- Mobility-Aware Coordination in a WLAN Hot-Spot Area.- Application-Independent Session Mobility Between User Terminals.- Using Multiple Communication Channels in a Mobile Agent Platform.- Challenges in Modelling and Using Quality of Context (QoC).- Secure and Scalable Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks.- RAPOSI: Rapidly Installable Positioning System for Indoor Environments.- Integrating a New Mobility Service into the Jade Agent Toolkit.- A New Protocol for Protecting a Mobile Agent Using a Reference Clone.- A Novel Approach Towards Autonomic Management in Context-Aware Communication Systems.- Abstraction for Privacy in Context-Aware Environments.- A Probabilistic Heuristic for Conflict Detection in Policy Based Management of Diffserv Networks.- LEA2C: Low Energy Adaptive Connectionist Clustering for Wireless Sensor Networks.

A multimedia medical communications system

The problem of communicating the radiologists findings to the attending physician is introduced, and it is shown why it is essentially a multimedia communication problem. A multimedia communications system that was designed with a focus on database and medical reports organization and architecture is described. A report is presented of some of the key results of an in-house trial linking the Department of Radiological Sciences and the Emergency Department at the Ottawa Civic Hospital, Canada, a 950-bed tertiary-care teaching hospital. >