A Study on Email-based Mobile Agent Runtime Environment

Abstract

現今，電腦硬體和軟體技術在網際網路的應用上其發展非常地快速。應用這些新的軟硬體技術在資訊擷取都已經獲得了相當大的成功。因為在網路上從事資訊擷取的應用非常地重要，在此方面的研究已經有相當多的成果。然而，目前這些資訊擷取方面的研究成果，主要大多是假設其使用的作業平台都具有穩定且高速的網路環境和強大的運算能力，對於那些網路連線速度慢且不穩定、運算能力薄弱且電源供應和相關資源都缺乏的行動運算設備和環境來說，要應用這些研究成果是非常困難且不容易的。

本論文的目的即在於廣泛地研究這一類資源缺乏的行動計算環境在資訊擷取及相關技術方面的問題，並提出一個可行的架構以解決這些問題。在論文中，我們考慮所有移動裝置使用者在從事資訊擷取時可能遇到的狀況，然後提出一個建構於有限資源計算能力和低品質網路移動式設備上的工作架構，讓使用者可以在此類網路上擷取出他所需要的有用資訊。在我們的設計中，使用者可以輕易地利用他能上網的移動設備在區域網路及網際網路上擷取他有興趣的資訊，而這些移動式設備可以包含行動電話、PDA、甚至是掌上型的筆記型電腦。由於這些裝置在操作行為模式及介面上非常地多樣化，所以我們使用標準的電子郵件通訊協定讓使用者可以用一致性的操作介面在區域網路及網際網路中擷取資訊。

電子郵件是所有可以上網的裝置中最受歡迎的網路服務之一，使得電子郵件的協定和其客戶端操作軟體在不同的可上網裝置中具有一致性。也因此，透過電子郵件來做為資訊擷取的媒介也將被一致化。也就是說，使用者可以利用一致性的介面和操作方式在我們設計的工作架構下設計、和操作一些在伺服器端的可移動式的行動代理程式，而這些行動代理程式即可在具有良好網路環境及高速計算能力的遠端伺服器中為使用者高速地擷取資訊及分析資料，不用去擔心他現在使用的是那一種行動裝置。

Currently, the technologies of hardware and software about the Internet and information processing are developed in a very high pace. Applying these new technologies into the area of information retrieval is very successful. Because of the importance of information retrieval via the network, there are lots of prior studies dedicated in these related topics, and they have already got plenty of successful outcomes, but most of those researches always assume that the platforms by means of those technologies have good quality networks and high computing power CPU. For those poor quality networks, low computing power CPU, and resource-constrained mobile devices, obviously, most of the previous research outcomes usually can’t be easily adopted.

The objective of this dissertation is to study such resource-constrained mobile computing circumstances for information retrieval and related applications, and to propose a feasible framework to solve such situation. In this dissertation, we take care all situations that a mobile user may run into, and then propose a framework for the mobile devices with low-computing-power and poor-quality-networks to retrieval the information he is interested in from the network. In our design, a mobile user can retrieve the information from the network or the Internet via his/her networked mobile device. The mobile devices may include mobile phones, PDA, or mini-notebook PCs. Because the interface and operating model of those mobile devices are very diverse, to uniform the user interface among these devices, we utilize e-mail protocol and mobile agent technologies for the user to retrieve the information from the network or the Internet.

Because the e-mail is one of the most popular applications for all networked devices, and the e-mail protocol and e-mail client operation are common and uniform in those networked devices, the information retrieval operating interface will be unified. That is, the user may utilize the unified interface of our proposed framework to design, operate, and execute some mobile agents in the server-side, and those mobile agents will retrieve the information for the user in a very good computing environment. The user doesn’t need to worry about what kind of the mobile device he/she will use in the whole information retrieval process.