Self-Organizing Real-Time Service Dissemination and Collection Using Mobile Agents for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network consists of only mobile nodes without the access points and the center server. In the mobile ad hoc network environment, a set of nodes in the network and the network topology are frequently changing due to the node appearance, the node disappearance, and the node movement so that it is not easy for users in the network to obtain the services provided in the network. Therefore, without the service discovery scheme, it is impossible to inform the users in the network of the service information provided in the network. However, since there are no center servers in the mobile ad hoc network environment, the self-organized mechanism must be examined to collect the service information in the network and disseminate them to the users. Besides, since the changes of users or the services in the network occur many times with time, they should be reflected as short time as possible. Therefore, we propose a new scheme for self-organizing real-time service dissemination and collection using mobile agents in the mobile ad hoc network environment. Mobile agents migrate among nodes to collect the service information in the network and disseminate them to the users in the network. Finally, we conducted simulation experiments to show the performance of the proposed scheme with respect to the service dissemination time.