Mobile Agent Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, mobile agents have been proposed for efficient data dissemination in sensor networks. In the traditional client/server-based computing architecture, data at multiple sources are transferred to a destination; whereas in the mobile-agent based computing paradigm, a task-specific executable code traverses the relevant sources to gather data. Mobile agents can be used to greatly reduce the communication cost, especially over low bandwidth links, by moving the processing function to the data rather than bringing the data to a central processor. This paper proposes to use the mobile agent paradigm for reducing and aggregating data in a planar sensor network architecture. The proposed architecture is called mobile agent based wireless sensor network (MAWSN). Extensive simulation shows that MAWSN exhibits better performance than client/server communications in terms of energy consumption and the packet delivery ratio. However, MAWSN has a longer end-to-end latency than client/server communications in certain conditions.