The Sol agent platform: Enabling group communication and interoperability of self-configuring agents in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT for short) envisions a world in which a set of heterogeneous devices are interconnected and using the Internet, work together to provide valuable services for users. The deployment of applications in the IoT requires managing a high diversity of devices, achieving their communication through different communication protocols, dealing with the incompatibilities between underlying networks, even at runtime. So, the main goal of the IoT is to cope with these interoperability issues adequately. Agent technology offers the necessary means to manage distribution and many other requirements of the IoT satisfactorily, however current agent platforms neither deal adequately with the heterogeneity of these environments, nor provide explicit support for the dissemination of data to a group of related IoT nodes. In addition, current agent architectures are normally implemented and deployed for a specific agent platform using a concrete communication protocol. But agent platforms have paid scant attention to providing agent architectures with a flexible communication infrastructure that makes the modification of communication-related concerns possible both at design and even at runtime. In this paper we present Sol, an agent platform that deals with all these limitations suffered by current agent platforms. The main motivation of this work is to promote the use of agents for the development of IoT systems by providing the necessary services required by software agents running embedded in heterogenous devices and interconnected by different communication networks. The Sol platform also makes it possible for software agents to self-configure their communication-related concerns by binding the appropriate plug-in. We illustrate the benefits of our approach with several scenarios of a real Intelligent Museum, and show its feasibility in terms of reconfiguration times and data exchange through heterogeneous wireless technologies, so important in the IoT.