Performance Evaluation of Distributed Computing Paradigms in Mobile Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

The emergence of mobile ad hoc sensor networks has brought new challenges to traditional network design. This paper focuses on the study at the application layer. In specific, it compares the performance of two distributed computing paradigms, the client/server-based paradigm and the mobile-agent-based paradigm, through mathematical modeling and simulation. The differences between the two computing paradigms can be characterized by what is transferred over the network and correspondingly, where data processing is carried out. In the client/server-based computing, clients send data to a server and data processing is done at the server ; while in the mobileagent-based computing, the server dispatches mobile agents which carry executable codes to clients and data processing is done locally. Previous works have shown that the mobile-agent-based paradigm is more appropriate to handle computations in ad hoc sensor networks. However, no simulation work has done to quantitatively measure This research was supported in part by DARPA under grant N66001-001-8946. 1 the performance. This paper first describes how computing is accomplished in the mobile-agent-based paradigm. It then presents a modified mathematical model and uses the execution time as a metric to measure the performance. The simulation is written using GloMoSim. Eight experiments are designed to show the effect of different parameters to the performance of the paradigms. Experimental results show that the mobile-agent-based computing does not always perform better than the client/serverbased since the usage of mobile agents also brings overhead. However, in the context of mobile ad hoc sensor networks with hundreds or even thousands of nodes, unreliable communication links, and reduced bandwidth, the mobile-agent-based computing provides solutions to low network latency and reliable data processing.