Resource Management Middleware Using Mobile Agents for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The ad hoc network is a kind of autonomous decentralized networks that consist of mobile nodes and wireless links. Therefore, there are no nodes called administrator to manage the network. Many routing protocols and application for mobile ad hoc networks have been proposed so far, and then some test-bed systems have been constructed to evaluate the ad hoc network system in the real environment. However, in the real environment, it is not easy to evaluate the ad hoc network system because we have to disseminate the software resources for routing protocols or application to each node and keep a consistency of them among all nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes the resource management middleware to autonomously manage resources among all nodes in the network using mobile agents for mobile ad hoc networks. In order to assess the need of the proposed resource management middleware, we show the effect of using mobile agents in mobile ad hoc network environment through simulation environment. In addition to the simulation experiments, we implement the proposed resource management middleware on laptop PC's and demonstrate the field experiments.