Discovery Channel News Friday, December 15, 2006 Agilla: Software 'Agents' Clone Themselves
By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News "The technology could help fight fires, monitor environmental conditions, or even help blind people navigate buildings." Dec. 15, 2006 - It has the classic elements of a good spy story: secret agents that infiltrate a network and clone themselves to do the work of many. But this story has a happy ending. The agents in question are mobile, self-contained pieces of software that can take over sensors in a wireless network and direct them to accomplish specific tasks. The technology could help fight fires, monitor environmental conditions, or even help blind people navigate buildings. "Our software is the first to allow this flexible sharing of a sensor network infrastructure," said Gruia-Catalin Roman, professor and chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Most existing wireless sensor networks are built with small devices called motes. Each mote includes a battery, a computer, a radio and a sensor - which monitors for variables such as light, vibration and temperature, takes pictures, or listens for sounds. Such networks can consist of hundreds or even thousands of motes, and they can be placed just about anywhere it might be useful to pick up information from the environment. Most of them perform a single task - for example, monitoring temperature or vibrations in the air. Re-tasking generally requires configuring each sensor anew. "This is a major problem. Since these systems exist in the real world, the dynamics and unpredictability often require new solutions," explained professor Jack Stankovic of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Stankovic is not associated with the research. To overcome that limitation, Roman, his colleague Chenyang Lu and their doctoral student Chien-Liang Fok have developed a software system called Agilla. Once equipped with the software, individual sensors in a network can detect an environmental condition and communicate with the neighboring sensors - thus creating "clones" that perform tasks based on what their neighbors are doing, or sensing. In laboratory experiments, Roman and his colleagues used the agents to monitor simulated fires and help robots navigate around them. In a real life situation, a firefighter could potentially tap into the network with a PDA and learn where the fire is and how intense it is. "Agilla is small enough to fit on motes, general enough to support many kinds of functionality. I think it is also efficient enough to be viable," said Stankovic. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/12/15/selfclone_tec.html?category=technology&guid=20061215153030 -- E. G. Ravikumar E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mobile: 0-9841394775 To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
