Sensor networks with mobile agents

Architecture for large scale low power sensor network is proposed. Referred to as sensor networks with mobile agents (SENMA), SENMA exploit node redundancies by introducing mobile agents that communicate opportunistically with a large field of sensors. The addition of mobile agents shifts computationally intensive tasks away from primitive sensors to more powerful mobile agents, which enables energy efficient operations under severely limited power constraints. An opportunistic ALOHA random access coupled with a direct sequence spread spectrum physical layer is proposed. A comparison of SENMA with a flat ad hoc sensor network shows a substantial gain in energy efficiency.