A communication protocol for agents on handheld devices

Handheld devices are now much more than just personal information management devices. With the ability to view and edit documents, send and receive email, run presentations, serve as clients to backend applications, and access the Internet, they have evolved into powerful business tools. Agent Technology has, in our opinion, a great potential to fully blossom in this new scenario, enabling new and more effective services and applications. There are however some drawbacks that have to be taken into account when trying to deploy multi agent systems on handheld devices, such as low data rates, disconnections, dynamic IP-address assignment and difficulty in pushing information to an agent on a wireless device. In this paper we present a solution that has been designed and implemented within the LEAP project in order to face these drawbacks and to fully support agent communication in the wireless environment. This solution is based on a simple and efficient protocol and an integrated "mediator-based" architecture where a proper element, active in the wire-line network, acts as a front-end for a wireless device.