Agile cargo tracking using mobile agents

Cargo tracking is vital for national security and useful for shippers and their customers. All of these users have different and evolving requirements, placing higher flexibility requirements than existing infrastructure can provide. This flexibility can be provided by equipping each shipping container with a wireless mote, which will form a wireless mesh network and monitor the containers’ contents. Each user can then deploy custom mobile agents to query the contents of the containers. Also, for security purposes, these motes can be equipped with sensors to detect and record anomalous events. We developed AgiTrack, a cargo tracking system using mobile agents in wireless sensor networks. AgiTrack is implemented on Agilla [1] and TinyOS, using Agilla mobile agents to track cargo. Mobile agents are suitable for this application since they allow for flexible and reliable application development and deployment. These agents are small enough for efficient, on-demand deployment. Agilla provides developers with mechanisms for spreading their agents throughout the sensor network. Agilla also provides a tuple space for facilitating inter-agent interactions. This demo presents AgiTrack. It uses 12 MICA2 motes, each attached to one container arranged in a 4x3 stack. These motes sense motion and light using attached MTS310 sensor boards. Two base stations, one on a “ship”, another on a “dock”, serve as aggregation points. The user issues queries from a laptop or PDA, which connects to the aggregation points using 802.11b and Limone [2], a lightweight communication middleware for ad hoc networks. When a

[1]  Gruia-Catalin Roman,et al.  A Lightweight Coordination Middleware for Mobile Computing , 2004, COORDINATION.

[2]  Chenyang Lu,et al.  Rapid Development and Flexible Deployment of Adaptive Wireless Sensor Network Applications , 2005, 25th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'05).

[3]  John W. Lockwood,et al.  Sensor fusion and correlation , 2005, SenSys '05.