Agent-cooperation based communication architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The main goal of wireless sensor networks is to gather information from the region of interest through a large number of micro sensor nodes. This gathering is based on a communication architecture such as client/server which consumes a lot of power and doesn't take in consideration the information properties. In this paper, we propose a new communication architecture for wireless sensor networks based on agents' cooperation. This architecture uses techniques from multi-agent systems and networks in order to ensure an optimal information gathering. It benefits from AODV not only for route discovery but also to define the basic list of cooperating agents, using the RREP control message. These agents create cooperatively a simple message summarizing the important information of multiple nodes, where it is widely known that sending a one big message consumes less energy than sending several small messages of the same quantity of information. In order to appreciate our contribution, we discuss its advantages and its limitations by comparing it to client/server and mobile agent architectures.