MASIF is a standard for mobile agent systems which has been adopted as an OMG technology. It is an early attempt to standardize an area of industry that, even though popular in the recent past, still has not caught on. In its short history MASIF has raised interest in industry and academia. There are already a number of projects pursuing MASIF reference implementation. MASIF addresses the interfaces between agent systems, not between agent applications and the agent system. Even though the former seem to be more relevant for application developers, it is the latter that impact interoperability between different agent systems. This paper describes two sets of interfaces that constitute MASIF: MAFAgentSystem and MAFFinder (the acronym MAF is used for historical reasons). MASIF extensively addresses security. The paper provides a brief description of MASIF and its interfaces, data types and data structures.
The emerging notion of active networks describes the general vision of communication network evolution, where the network nodes become active because they take part in the computation of applications and provision of customized services. In this context mobile agent technology and programmable switches are considered as enabling technologies. This article looks at the impact of mobile agent technology on telecommunication service environments, influenced by the intelligent network (IN) architecture. The authors illustrate how the integration of mobile agent platforms into IN elements, notably into the IN switches, will realize an active IN environment. This enables telecom services implemented through mobile service agents on a per user basis to be instantly deployed at programmable switching nodes, which results in better performance and fault tolerance compared to traditional IN service implementations
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