A Push-Based Agent Communication Model Empowering Assistive Technologies

Abstract

Nowadays Web services are one of the most commonly used technologies for distributed system integration and interoperability. Recently, a new communication technique called WebSockets has appeared for implementing Web services that offer a true server-push mechanism. In this paper we present a system based on it to manage agent communications, and we motivate its use in an Assistive Technologies use case. A new WebSocket Message Transport Protocol is described and an implementation for the Jade platform is presented. Subscription based agent interaction for the use case is presented, along with a comparison between WebSocket and HTTP Message Transport Protocols.