The purpose of MARIAN is to investigate the degree of suitability for mobile agent technology in routing, topology discovery, and automatic network reconfiguration in ad-hoc wireless networks. This research work has a technical focus and proposes to assess different models of the usage of static and mobile agents to determine the best route through adhoc networks. The determination of the best route is not an easy process, and requires research into metrics that identify the best path, such as network performance, processing power, node’s identification, battery power, and so on. These models will be appraised in terms of performance, reconfigurability, and easy of installation. In this paper we present a framework for MARIAN, which consists of three layers: foundation layer, intermediate layer, and core layer. KEYWORDS Mobile agents, stationary agents, wireless ad-hoc network, routing protocol, topology discovery, automatic network reconfiguration
Nikos Migas, William J. Buchanan, Kevin A. McArtne