Numi: Using Collaborative Agents to Enrich Service Environments

April 1, 2002 - January 1, 2005

A network of infostations offering high bandwidth islands of data connectivity has often been suggested as a viable alternative to cellular WAN for providing network connectivity for mobile devices. Current data management models proposed for such networks treat these infostations mainly as passive entities that offer devices in range, access to needed information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach wherein infostations actively participate in delivering content even to devices that are not in range. Other participating mobile devices that have excess spare capacity are used as carrier nodes to transport data towards remote devices. Short range wireless technologies enabling creation of ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking capabilities between devices are used to form transient communities to exchange information. The infostations are responsible for selecting appropriate carrier devices to use so that these carriers meet the device in need at the appropriate time to participate in this collaboration. Through this, dependency on the more expensive WAN networks is minimized. We present a design of our proposed framework and its components along with a prototype implementation.

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