A Ubiquitous Mobile Agent Media Service Framework

The quantity of personal media stored in digital form has followed an increasing trend over the past several years. This is mainly due to the number of devices available for creation and storage of media as well as the decreasing cost of the devices themselves. For the consumer, this means greater availability and affordability which has also resulted in an increasing amount of personal media being stored by individual users.;One potential solution to these challenges is to provide a generalized mobile agent framework that utilizes the abilities of mobile agents (communicative, collaborative and migratory) to dynamically overcome access barriers to distributed and stored media. Mobile agents have the ability to adapt to imposed situational constraints and provide real-time media access and consumption between devices and across networks.;This thesis proposes a novel mobile agent conceptual framework that is a combination of the mobile agent paradigm and traditional computing concepts which improve the ubiquitous media access and delivery paradigm. This thesis contends that due to a variety of limitations of commercial architectures and other media access research, the proposed hybrid agent framework provides greater flexibility, extensibility and scalability.;Despite the growth in media storage, the ability for users to easily access and consume their personal media has numerous limitations. Personal media is often viewed or consumed on the device where it is physically stored. This is primarily due to the manual and sometimes difficult steps users have to undergo to consume stored media from device-to-device. The problems are compounded if one desires to consume media from a device at a remote network location.