Mobile Agent Itinerary Planning Approaches in Wireless Sensor Networks- State of the Art and Current Challenges

A ubiquitous embedded network, such as wireless sensor network (WSN), is characterised by its capability to carry out common tasks by sharing resources that are placed in-node or in-network domains. One of the most critical properties of mobile agent (MA) based wireless sensor network is how to design the itinerary through the WSN for mobile agent. In addition to that, a huge amount of redundant data is generated by sensors due to node density and placement. This consumes network resources such as bandwidth and energy, thus decreasing the life time of sensor network. Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of using mobile agent technology as an effective technique to overcome these limitations. MA itinerary planning techniques can be classified into three categories depending on the factors that define the route of the MA: static-itinerary, dynamic-itinerary, and hybrid-based. This paper presents a survey of the state-of-the-art MA itinerary planning techniques in WSN. The benefits and shortcomings of different MA itinerary planning approaches are presented as motivation for future work into energy efficient MA itinerary planning mechanism.