Design of Agent-based Middleware for Extranet Management

We propose a novel, agent-based middleware for efficient management of an e-tranet. To keep an e-tranet in full working order, its network connections (e.g., routing, bandwidth assigning, etc.) have to be customized for the specific network services in a particular group. However, such customization work imposes a heavy workload on the e-tranet administrator, and this makes it very difficult to achieve efficient management of the e-tranet. To overcome this difficulty, we propose an agent- based middleware between the application layer and the transport layer of the e-tranet. This middleware controls network connections based on known specifications of the e-tranet, and thus it provides well-customized network connections for users and e-tranet applications. In this paper, we e-plain the design of the proposed agent- based middleware, describe its implementation, and report on e-perimental results.