Agent-based Development of Wireless Sensor Network Applications

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 paper, we promote the use of the agent paradigm for the development of WSN applications. After providing motivations about synergies between agents and WSNs and a brief overview about agent technology for WSNs, we describe the use of MAPS (Mobile Agent Platform for Sun SPOTs), our agent platform for WSNs, for the development of applications in important application domains based on wireless body sensor networks (e.g. e-Health) and building sensor and actuator networks (e.g. energy efficient buildings). Finally, we delineate the characteristics on which fullfledged agent-oriented methodologies for WSN applications could be built. Keywords-Agent-based development; agent-oriented programming frameworks; wireless sensor networks; state-based programming; MAPS; body sensor networks; bulding sensor and actuator networks