An Iterated Local Search Approach for Multiple Itinerary Planning in Mobile Agent-Based Sensor Fusion

The investigation of mobile agent (MA) middleware as a technology for implementing efficient data fusion schemes on wireless sensor networks (WSN) has been a subject of intense research in the past few years. Nevertheless, the itineraries followed by travelling MAs largely determine the overall performance of the data fusion applications. Along this line, this article introduces a novel algorithmic approach for efficient itinerary planning of MA objects engaged in data fusion tasks. Our algorithm adopts an iterated local search (ILS) approach in deriving the hop sequence of multiple travelling MAs over the deployed source nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gain of our method against existing multiple MA itinerary planning methods.