Wireless agents in ad hoc networks

With the current trend toward ubiquitous computing comes wireless devices capable of direct, peer-to-peer communication. Such devices will be capable of forming the nodes of ad hoc networks. In the near future, it is expected that ad hoc networks will be saturated with heterogeneous hardware and software requiring mechanisms to facilitate interoperability. At the application layer, such interoperability may be facilitated using software agents. Unfortunately, it is currently impractical to design, implement, and study device-based software agents within ad-hoc networks as the required hardware and software configurations do not yet exist. In this paper, we present a software framework for developing and studying device-based software agents in the context of ad hoc networks. We refer to this framework as the Wireless Agent Simulator.