High Energy-Efficient Mobile Agent Based Information Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we develop an improved energy-efficient mobile agent (EMA) paradigm for information aggregation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In EMA, destination node in each agent hopping keeps an instance of the arrival mobile agent's processing code. The following mobile agent, if the same information aggregation algorithm is required, carries only much short size executable script instead of large size full processing code. Simulation results show that EMA brings more than 10% percent energy saving compared to normal mobile agent method when the size ratio of full processing code and script is greater than 25, which shows that this EMA is particularly energy efficient when big size sophisticated information aggregation algorithm is implemented. Our method can also provide energy efficient flexible in-network processing for adaptive on-demand applications in WSNs.