Improved directed diffusion-based mobile agent mechanism for wireless sensor networks

How to determine the source-visiting sequence among the target sensor nodes and manage the mobile agent (MA) effectively is the crucial problem in Mobile-Agent-based computing model for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose a novel improved Directed Diffusion-based MA mechanism (IDDMA) for WSNs. IDDMA uses an improved gradient generation algorithm to set up multiple optimal gradients among sensor nodes. The source nodes will subsequently send two distinct types of the exploratory data packet to implement the discovery of the sources and build the routing tables for the MA routing, respectively. Then, the MA in target region could choose its next-hop node dynamically according to the established routing table for MA in each source node and achieve the data fusion; finally it will return to the Sink. Simulation results show that the mechanism outperforms two existing routing protocols in end-to-end packet delay and average energy consumption.