Agent-based network services

To succeed in a complex and dynamic battlespace, warfighters need to make timely and informed decisions at all levels of military command. Battle command systems must deliver mission-critical information to the right person at the right place and at the right time, in order to support today´s warfighters decision-making process at all echelons. This paper presents the architecture of a network service called the agent-based active network (ABAN) that provides an automated and intelligent information dissemination service for more effective communications under rapidly changing mobile environments. ABAN is designed to provide future military systems with scalable context-aware information services through customizable personalized agents. In an ABAN-enabled system, intelligent agents are injected into the fixed network to carry out dynamic information adaptation that is personally tailored to the individual user´s needs, adaptive to changing mobile environments including network conditions, device capabilities and user credentials. A prototype implementation of ABAN is described in the paper