MASPOT: A Mobile Agent System for Sun SPOT

Abstract

Mobile agents have been proposed as a means to address two important issues in the design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN): the need for reprogramming the network and decreasing energy expenditure. However, few mobile agent systems have been developed for WSN so far. In this paper we describe MASPOT, a mobile agent system for Sun SPOT, a WSN platform developed by Sun Microsystems. MASPOT provides a solution to the issues above and extends the range of Sun SPOT applications. To the best of our knowledge, MASPOT is the only Java-based mobile agent system for WSN that currently supports code migration. We describe the system and present the results of an experiment to evaluate the amount of energy spent during agent migration. It showed that migration spends around 0.03% of the nodes battery energy. Additionally, MASPOT uses only around 1.5% of the available flash memory of Sun SPOT nodes.