On Design of Mobile Agent Routing Algorithm for Information Gain Maximization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile agent routing for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks may considerably decrease the data traffic among sensor nodes. Finding an appropriate route which leads to the highest aggregation ratio is a major challenge in these networks. Complexities on the design of a mobile agent routing algorithm are related to the precise selection of source nodes and their visiting sequence during mobile agent migration. In this paper, the improvement of mobile agent routing for the dynamic model designed by Xu and Qi is proposed. Xu-Qi's model is developed to solve the problem of target tracking application using the mobile agent migration. The pattern of source nodes selection is based on the cost function, the trade-off between increasing the information gain and decreasing the energy consumption. In this paper, a method is proposed to expand the cost function; our method improves the impact of both information gain and power efficiency in source nodes selection; also, it increases the accuracy of aggregated data. The scope of wireless sensor networks covered by this paper is suitable for many applications. Simulation results in NS2 show that for networks with different number of nodes, the proposed method has less delay and energy consumption compared to Xu-Qi's model. Keywordswireless sensor networks; data aggregation; mobile agent; dynamic routing; information gain