Mobile Agent Migration Algorithms for Collaborative Processing

Distributed computing paradigm plays an important and fundamental role in facilitating collaboration among sensor nodes. The mobile agent computing paradigm has many benefits in the context of sensor networks. However, the most challenging problem in mobile agent based computing, the design of mobile agent itinerary, is left unanswered. 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 deriving mobile agent itinerary for collaborative processing, especially the dynamic mobile agent planning since it is more suitable for the wireless sensor networks. This paper presents two dynamic itinerary planning algorithms, 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 dynamic itinerary approach using the predictive dynamic itinerary algorithm.