Distributed Agent-Based Computing in Material-Embedded Sensor Network Systems With the Agent-on-Chip Architecture

Distributed material-embedded systems like sensor networks integrated in sensorial materials require new data processing and communication architectures. Reliability and robustness of the entire heterogeneous environment in the presence of node, sensor, link, data processing, and communication failures must be offered, especially concerning limited service of material-embedded systems after manufacturing. In this paper, multiagent systems with state-based mobile agents are used for computing in unreliable mesh-like networks of nodes, usually consisting of a single microchip, introducing a novel design approach for reliable distributed and parallel data processing on embedded systems with static resources. An advanced high-level synthesis approach is used to map the agent behavior to multiagent systems implementable entirely on microchip-level supporting agent-on-chip (AoC) processing architectures. The agent behavior, interaction, and mobility are fully integrated on the microchip using a reconfigurable pipelined communicating process architecture implemented with finite-state machines and register-transfer logic. The agent processing architecture is related to Petri Net token processing. A reconfiguration mechanism of the agent processing system achieves some degree of agent adaptation and algorithmic selection. The agent behavior, interaction, and mobility features are modeled and specified with an activity-based agent behavior programming language. Agent interaction and communication is provided by a simple tuple-space database implemented on node level and signals providing remote inter-node level communication and interaction.