The Use of Software Agents as Proxies

Today information can be accessed from the Internet using a variety of devices and via different types of networks. With such diversity, it is impossible for a server on the Internet to contain information for all different types of clients. A possible solution to this problem is to use proxies to alter the content and to provide network enhancements to suit client’s individual requirements. The current proxy-based solutions rely on static implementations which have several disadvantages. We believe that it will be possible to overcome these disadvantages by making the proxies transportable and active, ie. the use of proxy agents. In this paper we present the architecture of such a proxy agent system, and the implementation of a prototype to evaluate its viability. 1