Mobile Agent Based Topology Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, a novel mobile agent based topology discovery protocol is proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. Unlike existing protocols which also utilize mobile agents to collect topology information, the proposed protocol not only considers the fairness of the node visitation time by the agents, but also takes the frequency topology changes into consideration. The protocol optimizes the migrating strategy of the mobile agents during the topology discovery process. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks.