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.