Integrating Jade and MAPS for the Development of Agent-Based WSN Applications

Recent years have seen rapid advancements in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and software agents resulting, among others, in maturation of their technology platforms. Furthermore, benefits of combining these research areas have been analyzed. The MAPS agent platform allows fusion of agents and WSNs. However, due to the hardware limitation, MAPS misses important functionalities needed, for instance, in advanced decision support. Such functions are available, among others, in the JADE agent platform, geared towards more powerful computing devices. Therefore, integration of MAPS and JADE had to be considered. The aim of this paper is to discuss technical issues involved in achieving this goal

Determination of Itinerary Planning for Multiple Agents in Wireless Sensor Networks

The mobile agent is a new technology in wireless sensor networks that outperforms the traditional client/server architecture in terms of energy consumption, end to end delay and packet delivery ratio. Single mobile agent will not be efficient for large scale networks. Therefore, the use of multiple mobile agents will be an excellent solution to resolve the problem of the task duration especially for this kind of networks. The itinerary planning of mobile agents represents the main challenge to achieve the trade-off between energy consumption and end to end delay. In this article we present a new algorithm named Optimal Multi-Agents Itinerary Planning (OMIP). The source nodes are grouped into clusters and the sink sends a mobile agent to the cluster head of every cluster; which migrates between source nodes, collects and aggregates data before returning to the sink. The results of the simulations testify the efficiency of our algorithm against the existing algorithms of multi-agent itinerary planning. The performance gain is evident in terms of energy consumption, accumulated hop count and end to end delay of the tasks in the network

An analysis of java-based mobile agent platforms for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) represent a new form of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems successfully exploited in many different application areas within which they will play an increasingly important role in future. However, the development of applications for WSNs is an extremely challenging and error-prone task, so that the need for high-level, effective programming approaches is quite evident. Among the programming paradigms proposed so far, the agent-based approach can be seen as an effective promising solution on the basis of which a few software platforms for WSNs have been already developed. This paper proposes an in-depth analysis of the only two available Java-based mobile agent platforms for WSNs: Mobile Agent Platform for Sun SPOT (MAPS) and Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). In particular, the architecture, programming model and basic performance of MAPS and AFME are described and compared. Moreover, a simple yet effective case study concerning a mobile agent-based monitoring system for remote sensing and aggregation is proposed. This case study is developed both in MAPS and AFME on Sun SPOTs so as to allow both an analysis of efficacy of their programming models and an evaluation of their performances