The Mobile Agent Framework for Collaborative Processing in Sensor Networks ∗

Abstract

This chapter discusses the distributed computing paradigms used to support the col-laborative processing in sensor networks. Sensor networks form a typical distributed envi-ronment and the most popular computing paradigm deployed has been the client/server-based, where all the clients send the raw data to a processing center for data dissemi-nation, as illustrated in Fig. 1 (a). In some applications where the size of raw data is very large, the clients can perform some local processing and send a compressed version of the raw data or simply the local processing results to the processing center, as illus-trated in Fig. 1 (b). This scheme is widely used in distributed detection [33]. Sometimes, the client/server-based processing can be carried out hierarchically with multiple levels of processing centers as illustrated in Fig. 1 (c) to solve scalability problems [1]. Although popular, the client/server-based distributed computing is not suitable for applications developed in sensor networks as the sensor network possesses some unique characteristics that the client/server-based approach cannot accommodate. Here, we sum-marize these features as follows