On Mobile Agent Itinerary for Collaborative Processing in Sensor Networks

One of the most important problems studied in wireless sensor network applications is the collaborative processing among sensor nodes in order to compensate for each other’s sensing and computing capabilities and to tolerate faults. The client/server based paradigm and the mobile agent based paradigm are two popular computing models used in collaborative processing. One of the most challenging problems in mobile agent based computing is the design of mobile agent itinerary. An improper design of itinerary (or route) of mobile agent migration can largely deteriorate the performance of collaborative processing. In this paper, we study the key problem of mobile agent planning for collaborative processing in sensor networks. This paper first models the dynamic mobile agent planning problem. It then presents three itinerary planning algorithms, the static, the dynamic, and the predictive dynamic approaches. We design three metrics (energy consumption, network lifetime, and the number of hops ) and use simulation tools to quantitatively measure the performance of different itinerary planning algorithms. Simulation results show considerable improvement over the static itinerary and the dynamic itinerary approaches using the predictive dynamic itinerary algorithm.