Mobile Agent-Based Provision of Context-Awareness for Positioning

The convergence of wireless networking, mobile computing, pervasive devices, and location-sensing technologies has created a new class of computing, namely location-aware computing, that is based on the capability of an information infrastructure and/or of mobile terminals to recognize and to react to the user/object location. Standard protocols which allow an integrated use of heterogeneous technologies have been defined, but it is necessary to use terminals, which are enabled to exploit a minimal amount of resources and are equipped with required interfaces for localization and communication. In this work, we proposed a mobile agent-based solution that allows to detect and localize different kinds of objects of the everyday life, which are neither enabled to access the positioning infrastructure, nor support any location-sensing technologies. We describe the design and the prototypal implementation of a layered architecture, that supports the localization of devices, and simple pervasive and ubiquitous objects, by exploiting cheap and embedded technologies