Integrating wireless sensor networks with the Internet using mobile agents.
The scope of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications has traditionally been restricted by physical sensor coverage and limited computational power. Meanwhile, IP networks like the Internet offer tremendous connectivity and computing resources. Agimone is a middleware layer that integrates sensor and IP networks as a uniform platform for flexible application deployment. This layer allows applications to be deployed on the WSN in the form of mobile agents which can autonomously discover and migrate to other WSNs, using a common IP backbone as a bridge. Agimone is the first system that allows mobile agents to migrate between sensor and IP networks. It facilitates data sharing between WSNs and the IP network through remote tuple space operations, allowing sensors to easily defer expensive computations to more-powerful devices. The expressiveness of Agimone’s programming model has been demonstrated by examining a prototype cargo-tracking application. Its efficiency has been evaluated using two WSNs consisting of Mica2 motes connected by an IP network.
This work is primarily being conducted by Gregory Hackmann, Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman and Chenyang Lu in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
This research is supported by the Office of Naval Research under MURI research contract N00014-02-1-0715 and by the the NSF under NOSS contract CNS-0520220.