Application of mobile agent in VANET for measuring environmental data

In Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) vehicles equipped with wireless communication devices communicate with each other to share information or achieve some collaborative goal. Mobile agents because of their adaptability and mobility can be well utilized in designing VANET applications. In this paper, the vehicles in VANET are shown to collect environmental data. Here vehicles equipped with sensors to measure environmental data are sent from a monitoring center to some particular monitoring area. Each vehicle has mobile agent platform that may host one mobile agent. The mobile agent spawned at the monitoring center migrates from one vehicle to the other to reach the monitoring area. It (the agent) collects necessary data, processes it and brings back the result. This helps to measure environmental parameters in different areas without deploying fixed infrastructure and mobile agents ensure better utilization of network bandwidth. The application is simulated in OMNET++ with SUMO to generate road traffic. The results indicate scalability of the application for larger networks. With more no. of vehicles, more area can be covered.