Name-based location service for mobile agents in wireless sensor networks

Mobile agent technologies are effective ways of deploying applications in wireless sensor networks (WSN). There are currently several different approaches for enabling communication between agents operating on a WSN, but none of them allows for dynamic agent location determination. This introduces some restrictions which severely limit the usefulness of mobile agents on WSNs. In this paper, we propose a name-based location service for mobile agents in a WSN. The approach is largely implemented through the regular placement of landmark nodes across the WSN. We show that our approach can enable communication with the nearest target agent and maintains a constant level of communication among mobile agents over the whole WSN.