Enhancing the Internet of Things (IoT) via the Concept of Agent of Things (AoT) (original) (raw)

Agents of Things (AoT): An Intelligent Operational Concept of the Internet of Things (IoT)

In this conceptual paper, we review the definitions, characteristics, and architecture of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. We then identify the deficiencies of the IoT concept, analyze them, and discover the issue of lack of reasoning and intelligence in the IoT concept. We propose a solution to augment the IoT with intelligent software agents resulting in a new concept called the Agents of Things (AoT). The paper presents the AoT architecture and a scenario for one application of the proposed concept. Finally, it discusses the benefits of implementing AoT concept to solve real world issues and the future work.

Multi-Layer Agent Based Architecture for Internet of Things Systems

Journal of Information Technology Research, 2018

Nowadays, the Internet of things (IoT) is becoming a promising technology which revolutionizes and simplifies our daily life style. It allows interaction and cooperation between a large variety of pervasive objects over wireless and wired connections, in order to achieve specific goals. Moreover, it provides a concise integration of physical world into computer systems through network infrastructure. This paper provides an agent-based architecture for developing IoT systems. The proposed architecture is multi-layer and generic. It encompasses four layers: Physical Component Management, Local Management -Coordination, Global Management-Coordination and Specialized Operative Management Layers. The first one can be seen as a smart layer that ensures connection and communication between things and the system. The second one constitutes the intelligent core of the system which acts locally to ensure coordination and further internal functioning. The third layer ensures coordination betwe...

An Agent-Based Approach for the Internet of Things

University of Mohamed Khider – Biskra, 2021

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become well known. It has attracted much attention thanks to its powerful application in different fields. Currently, billions of IoT devices are connected. The massive rise in the number of connected devices instantly produces further data that requires high storage and processing technology. Besides, the IoT equipment has limited processing, and storage capability did not allow data processing or even storage. Also, things cannot make smart and quick decisions to achieve their goals, and the thing ability to communicate with other things depends on service similarity and communication protocols; this will impact the performance, efficiency, development, and scalability of IoT applications. This thesis provides three main contributions, in the first contribution, we propose a Cloud-IoT approach to provide an efficient solution for the storage and analysis of data generated by IoT applications and improve IoT scalability. In order to demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach, a Cloud-IoT system for remote patient monitoring is developed. IoT security becomes a more challenging problem due to the computing and communication limits of IoT devices make IoT more vulnerable to security and privacy attacks. Hence, as a second contribution, we propose a robust solution based on lightweight cryptography to ensure data security. Also, we have used the access control mechanism to ensure data privacy. The experimentation demonstrates that the proposed solution more suitable for IoT devices. To tap the most out of massive data streams, IoT needs real-time management and analysis of data. In order to enhance the intelligence of IoT devices and to improve our first approach, we have developed an efficient, autonomous, and real-time solution based on the agent for data management and analysis as a third contribution. The proposed system can make fast and apt decisions in an emergency case.

Towards the internet of agents: an analysis of the internet of things from the intelligence and autonomy perspective

Recently, the scientific community has demonstrated a special interest in the process related to the integration of the agent-oriented technology with Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. Then, it arises a novel approach named Internet of Agents (IoA) as an alternative to add an intelligence and autonomy component for IoT devices and networks. This paper presents an analysis of the main benefits derived from the use of the IoA approach, based on a practical point of view regarding the necessities that humans demand in their daily life and work, which can be solved by IoT networks modeled as IoA infrastructures. It has been presented 24 study cases of the IoA approach at different domains ––smart industry, smart city and smart health wellbeing–– in order to define the scope of these proposals in terms of intelligence and autonomy in contrast to their corresponding generic IoT applications.

Embedded Agents for the Development of Smart Devices on the Internet of Things

2022

The Internet of things (IoT) is currently contributing to a growing range of applications for intelligent environments by means of the interconnection of heterogeneous IoT smart devices over the Internet. Generally, smart devices are implemented through services (e.g., REST webservices) which can be consumed by other services or any other external application. In any case, services are essentially passive requiring necessarily another consuming software entity to be use. In this paper, the development of a new class of smart IoT device, called smart agent-based IoT device is proposed based on the implementation of software embedded agents. These agents can be executed proactively exploring the services, resources, devices, and even other agents located in the IoT environment to enhance the functionality of the smart agent-based device. In this way, we can improve overall system performance at runtime in a unaware IoT environment where IoT devices and available resources are not known a priori. In this paper, a description of the embedded agent model and the smart agent-based IoT device are outlined as well as how it is applied in the context of a smart home environment.

A lightweight agent-based architecture for the Internet of Things

We present a lightweight software agent-based architecture for the Internet of Things. The architecture is based on the REST principles and the Internet Drafts by the IETF CoRE Working Group. The software agents describe the state of a computational task, which is then disseminated in message-passing manner in between the participating devices in the system. The computational tasks can be injected into the system dynamically in runtime by the system devices or by external devices, such as smartphones, through proxies. This computation and its state can then be registered as a service in the system and queried by clients as the service content.

Software agents meet internet of things

Internet Technology Letters, 2018

The last few years have seen a rapid democratization of things to the extent that they have become omnipresent in our surroundings and daily lives. Many buzzwords like smart cities, smart homes, and smart wrists exemplify thing democratization. Unfortunately, Internet of Things (IoT) adoption is slowing down due to first, the nature of things being usually "passive" and second, the multiplicity of things' development tools and communication standards. Both are impacting the quality of IoT applications and undermining the capabilities that these applications could offer to users. In this position paper, we discuss the "agentification" of things, using norms and commitments, as a means to address their passive nature. At the conceptual level, norms ensure that things operate in accordance to users' best interests. Also, at the operational level, commitments ensure that things will not deviate from the prescribed norms and hence, avoid violations that could lead to penalties. An architecture supporting thing agentification along with some ongoing efforts are discussed in this paper.

From Internet of Things to Internet of Agents

From sophisticated single agent in complex environments to multi-agent system (MAS) organizations, intelligent software agent research has come a long way in just under two decades. Many new branches of research in this field have emerged over the years which have enabled today's agents to perform a wide variety of human-like tasks such as learning, reasoning, negotiating, self-organizing and trusting each other, etc. Unfortunately, very few practical MASs have been deployed after such a long period of intensive research and development. For MASs to achieve higher popularity among end-users, we believe that agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) should adopt a new paradigm as has been done in Web 2.0 -to allow endusers to actively participate in developing or modifying features in agents at various stages of the agent's lifecycle. In this paper, we propose a vision for democratizing AOSE. We discuss what potential new researches need to be carried out in the areas of AOSE and agent learning in order to realize such a vision of moving from MASs to mass end-user agent development, and discuss potential challenges facing various aspects of this vision.

Multi-agent systems for scalable internet of things security

Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet of things, Data and Cloud Computing - ICC '17, 2017

Providing effective and scalable real-time security to Internet of Things devices can be a challenging task given the limited computational capacity of the devices and the amount of network traffic that can be viewed at any given time. Multi-Agent Systems have proven to be a valuable tool within the areas of cyber security, distributed networks and legacy systems because of their scalable and flexible architecture. In this paper we present a novel implementation of a Completely Decentralised Multi-Agent System for use within, or to support, Internet of Things networks through the distributed processing of security events to offload the computational cost of data processing from Internet of Things devices. The concepts of conditions and effects are introduced to allow agents to describe digital evidence found in an abstract language instead of sharing individual pieces of data to mitigate concerns of data leakage in extended networks. Emphasis is placed upon the scalable architecture design allowing domain experts to independently create agents specific to a particular technology or application process which will automatically work with other existing agents without further configuration.

Towards a Design Model for Things in Agents of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to augment the Internet by enabling machine to machine (M2M) communication. However, the machines, or 'things' lack of self-reasoning capability limits their potential applications in other value-added services. Consequently, we introduce the concept of Agents of Things (AoT) as an extension to the IoT, in which the things are embedded with self-reasoning intelligent software agents to provide value-added services to humans. Two crucial issues in designing intelligent things are to determine what value-added services they should offer and the subsequent level of reasoning abilities for the things. Therefore, we need to find an optimal match between the hardware capabilities of the things and their software agents' reasoning abilities to deliver value-added services on top of performing their basic IoT functions. In this paper, we present the results of the software analyses represented by a software spectrum and the hardware analyses represented by a hardware spectrum. We then associate the two spectrums to form a structured hardware-software optimizer for the thing's design model.