A Survey on Mobile Agent Itinerary Planning for Information Fusion in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), mobile agent (MA) is a new paradigm that has gained more attention lately. In this paradigm, MA migrates among sensor nodes (SNs) for data fusion. However, in comparison to traditional client/server paradigm; where each SN in the network sends its collected data to the sink, MA presents a good alternative in terms of energy consumption, response time and network lifetime. In this paradigm, the most critical properties of MA is the itinerary planning, it has always been an issue and a NP-hard problem. In this paper, we present a survey of the proposed itinerary planning approaches for MAs in WSNs. MA itinerary planning techniques can be classified into three categories: static itinerary planning, dynamic itinerary planning and hybrid itinerary planing. The benefits and shortcomings of different MA itinerary planning approaches are presented. Furthermore, we implement, simulate and compare the most prominent itinerary planning algorithms upon a common parameter space, making realistic network-level assumptions.