A Mobile Agent Based Mechanism to Discover Geographical Positions of Nodes in Ad Hoc Wireless Network

A mechanism to discover the geographical positions of mobile nodes in ad hoc wireless networks through the implementation of a mobile-multi-agent based framework is investigated in this work. In other words, we have developed an agent based information exchange and navigation protocol in order to make each node in the network aware of the positions of other nodes. Our primary aim is to collect position-related information from each node in the network and distribute them periodically (as updates) to other nodes through mobile agents. The notion of stigmergic communication has been used through the implementation of a shared information cache in each node. We have used the GPS (Global Positioning System) support at each node for the extraction of geographical co-ordinates, velocity and direction of movement of each node. We have also incorporated a predictive mechanism which helps each node to predict the instantaneous positions of other nodes, based on the information that agents had fetched in the near past. As a direct outcome of infiltrating geographical position information of all other nodes into each node, the foundations for designing efficient routing scheme and distributed network management gets automatically laid. We have presented the performance analysis of our protocol in support of the agent-based system, which proves to be effective, especially to the capacity of generating minimal congestion in the network.