Using Mobile Agents as Enabling Technology for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are emerging as powerful platforms for distributed embedded computing supporting a variety of high-impact applications. However programming WSNs is a complex task which requires suitable paradigms and technologies capable of supporting the specific characteristics of such networks which uniquely integrate distributed sensing, computation and communication. Mobile agents are a distributed computing paradigm based on code mobility that has already demonstrated high effectiveness and efficiency in IP-based highly dynamic distributed environments. We believe that mobile agents can provide more benefits in the context of WSNs than in conventional distributed environments. In this paper we first discuss the use of mobile agents as an effective enabling technology for WSN and, then, describe a lightweight framework for supporting mobile agents in WSNs.