Mobile Agent Technology for Distributed Sensing and Actuation Systems

Distributed sensing and actuation systems research has drawn a great attention in recent years from various research communities. These systems are usually deployed in wild fields using a wireless network for the communication. Due to the shortage of power supply and bandwidth, the less communication between system components is desired since it consumes much more power comparing with local computation and uses network bandwidth. In addition, the dynamics of the deployed environments requires distributed sensing and actuation systems being self-organized, scalable, and adaptable. To achieve these desirable characteristics, this paper proposes a mobile agent approach to reduce raw data transmission over a network and increase the flexibility of a distributed sensing and actuation system. The basic ideas of the proposed mobile agent method and the framework based on a mobile agent system called Mobile-C are introduced. Mobile-C is embedded into sensor nodes consisting of an embedded computer and several expansion boards for analog/digital signal input/output and wireless communication. The advantages of using mobile agent based wireless sensor networks for intelligent structure health monitoring are discussed, and a data analysis mobile agent example is given to demonstrate the capability of such a network to dynamically deploy data analysis algorithms and reduce raw data transmission.