The Application of Mobile Agent Technology to Mobility Management in MARINE 1 Mark Donnelly, Ivan Griffin, Conor Morris and John Nelson 2 , TELTEC Ireland, Foundation Building, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland. 30 th November 1998. Abstract This paper discusses the agent based mobility management functionality developed by the ACTS-340- MARINE project. MARINE’s mobility management procedures are based on mobile agent and distributed processing technology. The MARINE service, Broadband Video Telephony, is introduced as a scenario for the MARINE mobility management procedures. Three approaches for User Assistant agents to support user registration are addressed. Call setup scenarios for both intra/inter switch are described, and the use of a Route Finder agent to locate the called user for intra/inter network is introduced Introduction One of the main objectives of the MARINE project is to make use of the experiences gained from previous research projects in the area of Intelligent Networks enhanced with Broadband and Mobility capabilities. The project investigates the application of Mobile Agent Technology (MAT) and Distributed Processing Environment (DPE) technologies to IN based systems. The impact on the functionality of the IN elements and their interrelations are analysed and experimented. The MARINE project also investigates the provision of advanced broadband services using mobile agents and DPE technologies. In this paper, the design of mobility management procedures based on a mobile agent- based architecture is presented. Mobility Management Mobility management procedures are concerned with the maintenance of information in the network that can be used to locate the mobile user. The mobility management information stored in the network is used, for example, to support call handling (e.g. during call setup). In order to have access to a user service, a user is required to register in the network. This user registration information is changed whenever a user changes their registration for a service. A prerequisite to establishing a call between two mobile users is that both users have performed a successful user registration. The mobility management procedures implemented in MARINE are based on the specifications developed within the ACTS EXODUS project. Within EXODUS an IN-based distributed mobility management paradigm based on the enhancement of the Intelligent Network Application Protocol (INAP) has been investigated. The mobility management procedures specified in EXODUS will result in an increase of signaling overhead. One of the objectives of MARINE is to investigate the use of mobile agent and distributed processing techniques as an approach to reduce this signaling overhead and to overcome the bottleneck of a centralised IN architecture. Within MARINE, mobile users will be offered one service: Broadband Video Telephony (BVT). In order for the user to use this BVT service (i.e. to have the capability to either make or receive a BVT call) a mobility management procedure must be invoked. Example mobility management procedures are as follows: Location Registration, User Registration, User Deregistration, Remote Deregistration, etc. [MobMgt]. For each mobility management procedure a number of different scenarios exist. These scenarios are based upon whether the user has an existing registration for the same/different service, in the same/different network, etc. For the BVT call a number of different scenarios also exist depending on the location/registration of the called user. The reason for subdividing the procedures into scenarios is that substantially different object collaboration diagrams exist. 1 http://cordis.europa.eu/infowin/acts/rus/projects/ac340.htm 2 mark.donnelly@ul.ie , ivan.griffin@ul.ie , conor.morris@ul.ie , john.nelson@ul.ie