Directional source grouping for multi-agent itinerary planning in wireless sensor networks

As software entities that migrate among nodes, mobile agents (MAs) are able to deliver and execute codes for flexible application re-tasking, local processing, and collaborative signal and information processing. In contrast to the conventional wireless sensor network operations based on the client-server computing model, recent research has shown the efficiency of agent-based data collection and aggregation in collaborative and ubiquitous environments. In this paper, we consider the problem of calculating multiple itineraries for MAs to visit source nodes in parallel. Our algorithm iteratively partitions a directional sector zone where the source nodes are included in an itinerary. The length of an itinerary is controlled by the angle of the directional sector zone in such a way that near-optimal routes for MAs can be obtained by selecting the angle efficiently in an adaptive fashion. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as well as its performance gain over alternative approaches.