Linking physical worlds to logical worlds with mobile agents

This paper presents a general-purpose infrastructure for building and managing location-aware applications in ubiquitous computing settings. The goal of the infrastructure is to provide people, places, and objects with computational functionalities to support and annotate them. Using location-tracking systems, the infrastructure can navigate Java-based mobile agents to stationary or mobile computers near the entities and places to which the agents are attached, even when the locations change. The infrastructure enables application-specific functionalities to be implemented within mobile agents instead of the infrastructure itself. It maintains the locations of people and objects, including computing devices, and allows mobile users to directly access their personalized services from stationary computing devices in the environment or from their portable computing devices. This paper presents the rationale, design, implementation, and applications for our prototype infrastructure.