Energy-Efficient Itinerary Planning for Mobile Agents in Wireless Sensor Networks

Compared to conventional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that are operated based on the client-server computing model, mobile agent (MA) systems provide new capabilities for energy-efficient data dissemination by flexibly planning its itinerary for facilitating agent based data collection and aggregation. It has been known that finding the optimal itinerary is NP-hard and is still an open area of research. In this paper, we consider the impact of both data aggregation and energy-efficiency in sensor networks itinerary selection, We propose an itinerary energy minimum for first-source-selection (IEMF) algorithm, as well as the itinerary energy minimum algorithm (IEMA), the iterative version of IEMF. Our simulation experiments show that IEMF provides higher energy efficiency and lower delay compared to existing solutions, and IEMA outperforms IEMF with some moderate increase in computation complexity.