Abstract. Agent technology has evolved rapidly over the past few years along a number of dimensions giving rise to numerous “flavours ” of agents such as intelligent agents, mobile agents, etc. One of the most attractive and natural fields for the development of agent technology is the Internet with its vast quantity of available information and offered services. In fact, the term “Internet agent ” is effectively an umbrella for most of the other types of agents, since Internet agents should enjoy intelligence, mobility, adaptability, etc. All these different types of agents must be able to somehow interact with each other for the purpose of exchanging information, collaborating or managing heterogeneous environments. This survey presents some of the most common models and technologies that offer coordination mechanisms for Internet agents. It argues for the need of using coordination, then it presents some basic infrastructure technologies before examining in more detail particular coordination models for Internet agents, themselves classified into some general categories. 1

Abstract – Ad hoc wireless networks of deeply embedded devices such as micro-sensors and microactuators have emerged as one of the key growth areas for wireless networking and computing technologies. So far these networks/systems have been designed with static and custom architectures for specific tasks, thus providing inflexible operation and interaction capabilities. Various architectures are currently trying to make sensor networks programmable and open to transient users. Most of these schemes though, promote algorithms that are too centralized and/or too interactive (i.e. the user is involved in the control loop most of the time), losing the efficiency these highly resource-limited systems need. Our approach employs active networking concepts in the form of lightweight and mobile control scripts that allow the computation, communication, and sensing resources at the sensor nodes to be efficiently harnessed in an applicationspecific fashion. The replication/migration of such scripts in several sensor nodes allows the dynamic deployment of distributed algorithms into the network. Although these mobile control scripts have similarities to mobile agents for traditional data networks, a framework to support them has different considerations than its traditional data network counterpart. The paper discusses these considerations and design choices, and describes SensorWare, our implementation of such a framework. 1 I.

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