Mobile agents for pervasive computing

Pervasive computing is an emerging field where a user will interact with a large number of computing devices simultaneously providing access to the information and services anytime, anywhere. To realize that Mark Weiser's vision of disappearing technology and ubiquitous/pervasive computing a lot of research efforts are needed. A QoS based middleware is needed to integrate the existing technologies to develop pervasive computing applications. The use of multiple agents (in patterns such as master-slave and embassy) are not suitable for such applications, since these patterns are based on point-to-point communication and the coordination among the agents about the context information will create a lot of network traffic resulting in wastage of bandwidth that is a precious resource for mobile computing applications. An architecture to simplify this task (known as AWMG - agentspace with multicast groups), based on IP multicast messaging, has been designed and implemented. It has been evaluated by employing it in the development of middleware (SeSaS - Sensor System with agentSpace) to support a real-time sensor environment intended for use in context-aware computing.