Applications of agent technology in communications: a review

The rapid growth in the Internet users and diverse services have made the researches and practitioners to think of intelligent tools that can assist the users and applications in delivering the required quality of services. In this context, software agent technology is expected to become the tool for development of future softwares in distributed environments such as mobile computing, E-commerce, telecommunication network management, etc. Agent technology can be classified as single- and multi-agent systems (distributed static and mobile agents). In this paper, we review the software agent technology applications in communications with more emphasis on mobile agents since it is an emerging agent technology. The popularity of the agent technology is due to its support to: component based software engineering, flexible operations, easy software maintainability, adaptability to the real world, and extensibility of the softwares