Modeling of Agent Migration for Collaborative and Distributed Processing

The mobile agent based paradigm is a promising computing paradigm in wireless sensor networks, which has many unique advantages over the traditional client/server paradigm. However, the question on how to model the mobile agent itinerary in sensor networks, is left unsolved. The design of the mobile agent migration itinerary has a large impact on the performance of collaborative processing, which is the focus of this paper. We first model both the static and dynamic mobile agent planning problems, then a performance evaluation between these two models is conducted. Three metrics (energy consumption, network lifetime and the number of hops) are used in the simulation to quantitatively measure the performance of different itinerary planning methods. Simulation results show that the dynamic itinerary planning has considerable advantages over the static itinerary.