Ahmed Karmouch - Böcker

Communication systems are now ubiquitous and making them more intelligent remains very challenging.  The IFIP International Conference on Intelligence in Communication Systems is an effort to bring together researchers and practitioners who represent the latest developments in this area.  This volume contains selected papers from the conference in the following focus areas: ad hoc networks / hybrid networks / WLAN; security, privacy and consumer protection; adaptive architectures and protocols; flexible QoS and QoS management; flexible service specification, validation, searching and querying; service composition and Web services; personal, terminal and node mobility; programmable and active networks.

Communication systems are now ubiquitous and making them more intelligent remains very challenging.  The IFIP International Conference on Intelligence in Communication Systems is an effort to bring together researchers and practitioners who represent the latest developments in this area.  This volume contains selected papers from the conference in the following focus areas: ad hoc networks / hybrid networks / WLAN; security, privacy and consumer protection; adaptive architectures and protocols; flexible QoS and QoS management; flexible service specification, validation, searching and querying; service composition and Web services; personal, terminal and node mobility; programmable and active networks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Mobile Agents for Telecommunication Applications, MATA 2002, held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2002. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent architecture, framework, and platforms; mobile agent frameworks for telecommunication services; mobile agents in active networks; context-aware and ad-hoc communications; distributed monitoring and network management; security of mobile agents; mobile computing and QoS; migration and network management; mobile services; and collaborative environments and services.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mobility Aware Technologies and Applications, MATA 2004, held in Florianopolis, Brazil in October 2004.The 35 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on context-aware support for mobile systems, context-aware applications and networks, service and network management, grid and agent technologies in mobile environments, sensor networks, security issues, performance and QoS, mobility-aware systems and services, and agent technology and applications.

The beginning of the twenty-first century is characterized by global markets, and the mobility of people is becoming an important fact of life. Consequently, the mobile user is demanding appropriate technical solutions to make use of customized information and communication services. In this context the notion of next-generation networks (NGNs), which are driven by the convergence of the entertainment sector, the mobile Internet, and fixed/mobile telecommunications, is emerging. Such NGNs are aggregating a variety of different access networks and supporting the seamless connection of an open set of end-user devices, and due to the adoption of an all-IP network paradigm they enable a much better integration of voice and data services. Coincidently the buzzword ‘fixed mobile convergence’ (FMC) describes the current trend towards providing common services across fixed and mobile networks resulting in the medium term in the full integration of fixed and mobile telecommunication networks. The adoption of appropriate middleware technologies and the provision of - called service delivery platforms driven by the ongoing innovation in the field of information technologies provides today the technical foundation for supporting terminal, personal and service mobility and thus the implementation of real seamless information and communication services. Furthermore, users are nowadays looking, in light of an omnipresent service environment, for a much higher degree of customization and context awareness in the services they use. The papers in this volume look at these enabling mobility-aware technologies and their use for implementing mobility-aware and context-aware applications.

A software agent has a spectrum of definitions. At one end of the scale are relatively simple, client-based software applications that can assist users in performing mundane tasks such as sorting e-mail or downloading web pages. This class of agents is often referred to as “personal assistant” agents. At the other end of the scale is the concept of sophisticated software entities possessing artificial intelligence that autonomously travel through a network environment and make complex decisions on a user's behalf.In telecommunications, the definition lies somewhere between those two extremes. This classification of mobile agents, although not strictly adhering to the definition of “intelligent agents” originally proposed by the artificial intelligence community, is generally acknowledged to be a useful categorization and has started to gain widespread acceptance. We therefore define a mobile agent as a program that acts on behalf of a user or another program and is able to migrate from host to host on a network under its own control. The agent chooses when and where it will migrate and may interrupt its own execution and continue elsewhere on the network. The agent returns results and messages in an asynchronous fashion.This volume discusses the emerging field of mobile software agents and their applications to the area of telecommunications, such as active networks, e-commerce, the Internet, interactive QoS, network management, and feature interactions. It addresses the needs of a wide audience, including researchers, software agent systems and telecommunication applications designers, and users of software agents.