Mobile Agent Based Message Communication in Large Ad Hoc Networks Through Co-operative Routing Using Inter-agent Negotiation at Rendezvous Points

The wide availability of mobile devices equipped with wireless communication capabilities together with the technical possibility to form ad hoc networks paves the way for building highly dynamic communicating communities of mobile users. A key challenge is how to deliver messages in such networks incurring least routing overhead. Cooperative routing is a mobile-agent assisted team approach, which utilizes a set of fixed cluster head nodes to provide proper coordination and cooperation for exchanges and sharing of messages in the team. Our routing strategy aims at reducing routing overheads, message traffic and unnecessary random node visits in the network for delivering data. This routing protocol involves no proactive or reactive routing information overheads and as such the route decision only needs proper coordination and communication among the agents. The main benefit provided by cooperative routing is considerable network traffic reduction at high load. We highlight the main components of the system and discuss the agent life cycle in detail together with the parameters and strategies governing the migration of agents, their merging and termination.