On the development of mobile agent systems for wireless sensor networks : issues and solutions

Due to the growing exploitation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for enhancing all major conventional application domains and enabling brand new application domains, the development of applications based on WSNs has recently gained a significant focus. Thus, design methods, middleware and frameworks have been defined and made available to support high-level programming of WSN applications. However, even though many proposals do exist, more research efforts should still be devoted to the definition of WSN-oriented methodologies and tools fully supporting the development lifecycle of WSN applications. In this chapter, we promote the use of the mobile agent paradigm for the development of WSN applications and, specifically, describe issues and solutions for the development of mobile agent systems on resource-constrained wireless sensor platforms. In particular we discuss about the design of MAPS (Mobile Agent Platform for Sun SPOTs) and TinyMAPS, our Java-based mobile agent systems for WSNs, which enable agent-oriented development of WSN applications. In particular, while MAPS can run on the capable SunSPOT sensor devices, TinyMAPS is a version of MAPS tailored for more constrained Java-based sensor platforms such as Sentilla JCreate. An analysis of MAPS and TinyMAPS is provided showing analogies and differences among the two platforms. Finally a comparison of MAPS with AFME, another Java-based mobile agent system running on SunSPOT and based on a different architecture and programming model, is presented.