SAMSON: Strong Multi-Agent Simulation of Wireless Sensor Networks
Alexis Morris · 2008
Distributed systems have increased in scope and complexity and have brought new challenges in interaction design and management of decentralized components to the forefront of both industry and research (Kephart and Chess (2003)). One solution to handle this new scope is to develop systems that are ever more dynamic, selfaware, adapting, and optimizing (Wolf and Holvoet (2003)). Such “autonomic systems” merge the research advancements in the field of multi-agent software design, dynamic analysis, and decentralized control (Wolf and Holvoet (2003)) in order to assist designers in constructing complex distributed systems. In this new approach, interaction management is a central element of problem solving, (Jennings (2000)), and study of designs require studying interactions of decentralized and self-interested agents; commonly through simulation techniques. One domain that is particularly suited to autonomic designs is the wireless sensor network (WSN), as it consists of many distributed nodes in diverse and changing environments, that must interact over a common communication channel. Researchers have only just begun to apply multi-agent system design techniques in order to study improvements gained on such networks (Kho et al. (2007)), (Ruiz et al. (2005)), (Rogers et al. (2005)), (David Marsh (2004)), etc. Agents used in current research do not contain fully deliberative (or strong) reasoning systems, due to limitations of the current sensor hardware. Since hardware increases rapidly, it is expected that such systems will eventually be viable. This work aims to provide a generic and extensible simulator for further testing of interactions in strong multi-agent systems for WSN’s. To achieve this the belief, desire, intention (BDI) agent of Rao, (Rao and Georgeff (1995)), is used, as well as the Agentspeak language, (Rao (1996)), and the JASON framework (Bordini et al. (2007)). Additionally a model of current sensor hardware, (Sentilla (2008b)), is presented to show that strong agents are able to easily reflect common uses of WSN’s in practical scenarios. The STATUS project of ArsLogica (ArsLogica (2008b)), and the classical WSN Flooding protocol, (Akkaya and Younis (2005)), are used as testcases for the simulator concept and models.