Mobile agents for routing, topology discovery, and automatic network reconfiguration in ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Wireless networks and the usage of mobile devices are becoming popular in recent days, especially in creating ad-hoc networks. There is thus scope for developing mobile systems, where devices take an active part of creating a network infrastructure, and can actually be used to route data between networks. This research proposes to assess different models of the usage of static and mobile agents to determine the best route through ad-hoc networks. The determination of this route is a complex one, and requires research into the best metrics to identify the best path, such as memory capacity, network performance, processing capabilities, cost, and so on. One model is to use a mixture of mobile and static agents to gather relevant information. These agents could perform important tests, which could be used to generate the best route through a network. This research looks at different models for the deployment of these agents, which balance the usage of static and mobile agents. These are appraised in the terms of performance, reconfigurability, and ease of installation.