Mobile Agent Tracking Technology over Opportunistic Network
Transmitting data on an opportunistic network is much more difficult than that on a general network. The capability of an opportunistic network can be greatly enhanced if it is equipped with mobile agent functionality. A mobile agent platform that can support the execution of mobile agents requires a search mechanism for the platform to control its agents, such as suspension, resuming, and termination of agents. In this thesis, we investigate the application of mobile agent on an opportunistic network based on "CenWits System". In this system, each hiker carries a GPS enabled sensor node to collect and exchange movement statistics with its fellow hikers using a short range wireless links. Since the mobile agents are attached to the sensor nodes that hikers carry with, their mobility is constrained by the moving behavior of hikers since mobile agents can hop from one host to another only when two hosts (hikers) meet together. The little difference in walking speed and the uneven distribution of hikers make the hopping of mobile agents extremely slow and opportunistic. As a consequence, the search of mobile agents is slow and inefficient such that it is not acceptable for urgent agent functionality such as informing a team member of severe weather change. Therefore, we propose to construct a control point network using high speed network for search agents to travel in high speed. Under different objectives and constraints, we propose several placement models for control point network construction. After proving them to be NP-Complete, we propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the placement problem. We also propose a simple search algorithm for search agent to search target agents quickly by using a control point network.