Remote Data Collection and Analysis using Mobile Agents and Service-Oriented Architectures.

Abstract

The ubiquity of wireless systems have ushered us into a new era of mobile computing. With the emergence of superior input/output, communication hardware and cheap data services, mobile phones have become a bed for offering new and exotic services. Superior GUI and remote connectivity make mobile phones and PDAs good candidates for data collection, but lacking battery life and computational prowess, they are poor computational devices. We introduce a novel architecture that builds on agents on mobile phones as the front end and a service-oriented architecture composed of high-performance devices as the back end. Agent-based computing, which has proved to be advantageous for desktops⁄servers, can also encompass hand-held devices to provide us with new service management capabilities.

In this thesis, we discuss a new service deployment strategy on mobile phones based on mobile Agents. Mobile agent is an agent that can migrate from one node to the other node in the network while preserving its state. This solves the problem of introducing new services manually and provides the advantage of on-the-fly code updates for existing services. We also discuss the challenges of mobile agent development in Java, mainly introducing code migration in Java (J2ME), which is the critical component of a mobile agent, and interoperability among different J2ME profiles and with Java standard edition (J2SE). As a computational backbone for the architecture, we utilize inexpensive but powerful nodes based on the IBM Cell Broadband architecture namely through PlayStation (PS3) devices running on Linux. Powered by a RISC based main processing unit (PPU) and eight synergistic processing units (SPU), a PS3 can analyze large data sets with great speed. In this work, we also analyze the programming paradigm used in the PS3 machines. We discuss the design and implementation of several high-performance kernels in the PS3 and measure the speedup obtained corresponding to an x86 machine. Lastly, we discuss how high-performance computing can be introduced as a service by using platform-neutral protocols such as XML-RPC, to integrate the heterogeneous platform of mobile agents and service-oriented architectures (SOA).