Hive: distributed agents for networking things

Hive is a distributed agent platform, a decentralized system for building applications by networking local system resources. This paper presents the architecture of Hive, concentrating on the idea of an “ecology of distributed agents” and its implementation in a practical Java-based system. Hive provides ad-hoc agent interaction, ontologies of agent capabilities, mobile agents and a graphical interface to the distributed system. We are applying Hive to the problems of networking “Things That Think” (TTT), putting computation and communication in everyday places, such as your shoes, your kitchen or your own body. TTT shares the challenges and potentials of ubiquitous computing and embedded network applications. We have found that the flexibility of a distributed agent architecture is well suited for this application domain, enabling us to easily build applications and to reconfigure our systems on-the-fly. Hive enables us to make our environment and network more alive