6.2.1. Agent Roles

Physical agents are caught in the simulation world. They can access and modify any other agent in the virtual world and the simulation world itself. They are executed on a privileged level. But computational agents can leave the virtual world and enter the real world and vice versa. The loose coupling of the simulation with the crowd sensing network and to enable opportunistic sensing requires different agent privilege roles. Four different roles are supported by the platform:


The agent platform assigns a security level to new received agents (commonly level 0 or 1). The agents have to negotiate a higher level using the capability-based approach discussed in the next sub-section. The privilege level determines the set of API functions that an agent can access (e.g., migration, forking, and communication).
