Placement of control network for mobile agents over opportunistic networks

Transmitting data on an opportunistic network is much more difficult than that on a conventional network. We propose to use mobile agent technology to enhance its message transfer efficiency. A mobile agent platform requires a search mechanism to control its agents. We investigated the application of mobile agent on the opportunistic network characterized by "CenWits Search and Rescue System" applied in YuShan National Park as well as proposed a control network technology to support rapid agent search. Under different objectives and constraints, the control network deployment problem is formulated into several placement models. After proving them to be NP-hard, we designed several simple but efficient heuristic algorithms to solve the placement problems. A simple agent search algorithm based on the designed control network was designed to support rapid agent search, too.