Wireless Mobile Agents and the Internet of Things

Wireless Collaboration for First Responders, a white paper authored by Drakontas talks about the challenge of making a variety of communnications devices, databases, and information resources interoperable and evaluate in a non disruptive fashion in established organizations. Drakontas believes that networks should be built vertically (ad-hoc mode) “mesh or Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET)) and that mobile intelligent agents would be responsible for carrying information from one computing or communications device to another. These types of agents are task driven and network-aware. That is agents that can adapt their behavior based on their own knowledge about the state of the underlying network, and thus, alter its behavior based on information about the state of the network.

Drakontas is in the process of developing collaborative situation awareness capabilities such as agent based interactive whiteboards and GPS mapping, that can function across multiple handheld devices without the need centralized resources.

Extending the context of this white-paper to the Internet of Things is inspiring, because it address 2 challenges, namely scale and interoperability. Ad-hoc networks scale and agents can adapt to their hosts. Back in my engineering student days, I built such mobile “intelligent” agents.

In the context of blogjects, there is mention of objects and flocks creating “meaning”. However, they could transfer this burden to their agents. An agent task being to report on relevant information to its owner (an object, a blog, a pet, a human, …). An agent learns the topology of the networks, they are network-aware. An agent evolute and mutate. Instead of communicating information, devices could become more passive and transfer their communication skills to agents who know best. In the future, the Internet could uniquely transport ever-evolving task-driven “instances” carrying data.