Distributed sensor networks based on mobile agents paradigm

Distributed sensor networks (DSNs) are being developed for a wide range of applications. A sensor networks consist of a large number of nodes performing distributed sensing/event detection. Sensor nodes are energy-constrained, efficient routing is essential for increasing the lifetime of a sensor network. A DSN requires interoperability, low latency, and low power consumption in order to operate for long periods of time. Due to power constraints, DSN should be able to operate at low data rates and still delivering acceptable quality of service. In a DSN the energy required for communications tasks is usually much greater than the energy required for computational tasks. To reduce the data communication between nodes and to maximize the network lifetime, we propose to use the mobile-agent paradigm. In mobile-agent based DSN9 instead of moving data from an individual sensor node to a processing center as in the client-server based computing, mobile agents are dispatched from the processing center to the sensor nodes and process data locally. By moving code to the data, a mobile agent can reduce latency, bandwidth and vulnerability to network disconnection.