Mobile Software Agents for Wireless Network Mapping and Dynamic Routing

Mapping and dynamic routing in a wireless network are essential and basic operations that are the prerequisites for all higher order interactions between nodes on that network. The Intent of network mapping by multi mobile software agents is to obtain the topology of network in a distributed manner. In this paper we examine how software agents can wander in an unknown Ad hoc network with cooperation to report the topology of the network. We present results from a simulation of such a system and discuss the relationship between the overall efficiency of the system and diversity of the agent types, agent population, agent memory, inter-agent communication styles. In dynamic network routing, mobile agents are responsible for updating the routing table of nodes for a multi-hop communication purpose. The dynamic nature of the topology of the Ad hoc networks is due to mobility of some nodes in the network: wireless links are broken and reformed frequently. In this paper we present a dynamic, wireless, peer to peer network with routing tasks performed in a decentralized and distributed fashion by mobile software agents that cooperate to accumulate and distribute network connectivity information. We also examine different types of agents, stigmergic versus non stigmergic having identical overheads to study the outcome connectivity in a dynamic wireless network.