Balanced Itinerary Planning for Multiple Mobile Agents in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider the use of multiple mobile software agents to perform different tasks in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To this regard, determining the number of mobile agents in the WSN remains an open issue in solving multi-agent itinerary planning (MIP) problem. We propose a novel scheme entitled MST-MIP based on minimum spanning tree, where each branch stemmed from the sink corresponds to a group of source nodes assigned for a mobile agent to visit. Furthermore, a balancing factor is introduced to achieve a flexible trade-off control between energy cost and task duration, and the balanced MST-MIP algorithm is named BST-MIP. Extensive experiments show that MSTMIP has lower energy consumption than previous MIP proposals, while BST-MIP decreases the task duration up to 50%. Key words: mobile agent, itinerary planning, minimum spanning tree, wireless sensor networks

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ADHOCNETS
• Authors: Min Chen, Wei Cai, Sergio González-Valenzuela, Victor C. M. Leung
• Keywords: ADHOCNETS 2010, Computer Networks, Minimum Spanning, Mobile Agent, Wireless Sensor Networks