Embedded Agents for the Development of Smart Devices on the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is currently contributing to a growing range of applications for intelligent environments by means of the interconnection of heterogeneous IoT smart devices over the Internet. Generally, smart devices are implemented through services (e.g., REST webservices) which can be consumed by other services or any other external application. In any case, services are essentially passive requiring necessarily another consuming software entity to be use. In this paper, the development of a new class of smart IoT device, called smart agent-based IoT device is proposed based on the implementation of software embedded agents. These agents can be executed proactively exploring the services, resources, devices, and even other agents located in the IoT environment to enhance the functionality of the smart agent-based device. In this way, we can improve overall system performance at runtime in a unaware IoT environment where IoT devices and available resources are not known a priori. In this paper, a description of the embedded agent model and the smart agent-based IoT device are outlined as well as how it is applied in the context of a smart home environment.