Unified Distributed Computing and Co-ordination in Pervasive/Ubiquitous Networks with Mobile Multi-Agent Systems using a Modular and Portable Agent Code Processing Platform

Abstract

Abstract A novel and unified approach for reliable distributed and parallel computing using mobile agents is introduced. The agents can be deployed in large scale and hierarchical network environments crossing barriers transparently. The networks can consist of high- and low-resource nodes ranging from generic computers to microchips, and the supported network classes range from body area networks to the Internet including any kind of sensor and ambient network. Agents are represented by mobile program code that can be modified at run-time. The presented approach enables the development of sensor clouds and smart systems of the future integrated in daily use computing environments and the Internet. Agents can migrate between different hardware and software platforms by migrating the program code of the agent, embedding the state and the data of an agent, too. The entire information exchange and coordination of agents with other agents and the environment is performed by using a tuple space database. Beside architecture specific hardware and software implementations of the agent processing platform, there is a JavaScript (JS) implemen- tation layered on the top of a distributed management layer. The JS platform enables the integration of Multi-agent Systems (MAS) in Internet server and application environments (e.g., WEB browser). Agents can migrate transparently between hardware-level sensor networks and WEB browser applications or network servers and vice versa without any transformation required.