Coordination Strategies for Agent Migrations in Wireless Sensor Networks

Agent-based middleware platforms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received a lot of attention during the last years, due to their great flexibility in re-programming, monitoring, handling, and optimizing the application as well as the whole system. Even though many algorithms have been proposed for the dynamic placement of agents within the WSN, they do not take into account the coordination aspects of such migrations. This not only may result in slow convergence but also in perpetual oscillations of agent migrations, degrading application and system performance. In this paper, we propose full-coordination, semi-coordination, and non-coordination agent migration strategies, and evaluate their convergence and network overhead. We also provide proofs that convergence is guaranteed when dynamic agent placement algorithms adopt our proposed strategies. Our results show that the semi-coordination strategy is superior in terms of both network overhead and convergence rate.