A Middleware Architecture Supporting Native Mobile Agents for Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile Software Agents are widely used in telecommunication networks and the Internet, however their application to embedded systems such as Wireless Sensor Networks is immature. We present a novel middleware supporting and enabling Mobile Agent applications to run natively, without any translation layer, on Wireless Sensor Networks. We establish that Mobile Agent systems are beneficial for a wide range of applications – particularly when dealing with complex, dynamic and spatially distributed tasks, and demonstrate their power and certain performance metrics for an example applications. We use an accurate emulation platform to evaluate the system performance in a distributed control application implemented using mobile software agents.