Performance analysis of Client/Server versus Agent based communication in wireless sensor networks for health applications

This paper presents the performance results in using client/server and agent based communication techniques in wireless sensor networks for health-based applications. The performance study was carried out using an environment comprised of the JADE-LEAP agent middleware and the sun microsystems sunspot sensor hardware (via emulation). The performance studied showed that the overall throughput and individual sensor performance seems to be marginally better without the agent based middleware. However, this is misleading since in the ideal system, the entire agent would have moved from device to device rather than having to spend processing time creating a static agent / container on each sensor as was done in our study. A couple of interesting possibilities can be seen from the research carried out. The first would be to utilize a different type of sensor node that is not limited to the MIDP framework in order to allow the JADE-LEAP PJava version to be used. Another opportunity would be to look into enhancing the MIDP version of JADE-LEAP so that it can support mobility, or finding an alternative agent middleware.