Multiple mobile agents´ itinerary planning in wireless sensor networks: survey and evaluation

Over the last decade, mobile agent (MA) systems for surveillance applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has gained much attention. However, a conventional MA-based WSN may have the issues of energy efficiency and task duration as the scale of the network is increased. In order to overcome the drawbacks of using a single MA, dispatching two or more MAs for data collection simultaneously is a promising alternative in a WSN. The authors first discuss the itinerary planning issues for multiple MAs: deciding the number of MAs to be dispatched, grouping of source nodes for each MA, routing of each MA for its assigned source nodes. The authors then survey the existing algorithms for these issues, and evaluate their performance by OPNET.