Software agent-based directed diffusion in wireless sensor network

In an environment where node density is massive, placement is heterogeneous and redundant sensory traffic is produced; limited network resources such as bandwidth and energy are hastily consumed by individual sensor nodes. Equipped with only a limited battery power supply, this minimizes the lifetime of these sensor nodes. At the network layer, many researchers have tackled this issue by proposing several energy efficient routing schemes. All these schemes tend to save energy by elevating redundant data traffic via in-network processing and choosing empirically good and shortest routing paths for transfer of sensory data to a central location (sink) for further, application-specific processing. Seldom has an attempt been made to reduce network traffic by moving the application-specific code to the source nodes. We unmitigated our efforts to augment the node lifetime within a sensor network by introducing mobile agents. These mobile agents can be used to greatly reduce communication costs, especially over low bandwidth links, by moving the processing function to the data rather than bringing the data to a central processor. Toward this end, we propose an agent-based directed diffusion approach to increase sensor node efficiency and we present the experimental results.