Intelligent agents for routing on mobile ad-hoc networks

This paper introduces a new agent-based ad-hoc network routing protocol: mobile agent routing protocol (MAR). Mobile agents are simple packets that carry data and explore the network to collect routing information. They communicate with one another to exchange this routing information. By mobile agent exploration, the intelligence is put across the network, which enables the routing to be distributed and adaptive. Comparisons of MAR with another state-of-the-art ad-hoc routing protocol, the destination sequenced distance vector (DSDV), show that MAR performs significantly better than DSDV within 95% confidence interval at speeds greater than 0.1 m/s in terms of delay and the number of received packets.