Oscar Urra

Using Hitchhiker Mobile Agents for Environment Monitoring

Recently, there has been a great interest in the development of protocols and data management techniques for vehicular networks (VANETs). In a VANET, the vehicles form a wireless ad hoc network where different types of useful data can be exchanged by using the dynamic links that a vehicle can establish with its neighboring vehicles. While this offers opportunities to develop useful applications, many research challenges arise from the point of view of data management.

Mobile Agents in Vehicular Networks: Taking a First Ride

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a type of mobile network whose nodes are traveling cars which communicate with one another using short-range wireless communications. These cars can exchange and share different information among them, which can lead to the development of interesting applications that require the cooperation of vehicles or using the vehicular network as a distributed computing platform. Along with the opportunities offered by vehicular networks, a number of challenges also arise. To ease the development of applications for vehicular networks, mobile agent technology may be of help.

Testing mobile agent platforms over the air

Mobile agents are considered a suitable technology to develop applications for wireless environments with limited communication capabilities. Thus, they offer interesting advantages compared with a traditional client/server approach, derived from their autonomy and capability to move to remote computers. An important benefit is that mobile agents can carry the computation wherever it is needed at that moment. For example, instead of communicating a large amount of data from a computer to a mobile device, a mobile agent can move to that computer to process the data there, saving wireless communications. Similarly, a mobile device can assign a task to a mobile agent which travels to a fixed computer with the appropriate resources, relieving the overload of the mobile device. However, most experimental evaluations of the mobile agent technology focus on distributed environments with fixed computers connected through a wired network. Therefore, it is not clear how well prepared the current implementations of mobile agent platforms are to deal with unreliable, wireless communications, and with mobile devices with limited capabilities. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally the behavior of some platforms in such contexts, with the goal of motivating further research.

Agents Jumping in the Air: Dream or Reality?

Mobile agent technology has traditionally been recognized as a very useful approach to build applications for mobile computing and wireless environments. However, only a few studies report practical experiences with mobile agents in a wireless medium. This leads us to the following question: is mobile agent technology ready to be used in this environment? In this paper, we study existing mobile agent platforms by analyzing if they could be used effectively in a wireless medium. We identify some key missing features in the platforms and highlight the requirements and challenges that lie ahead. With this work, we expose existing problems and hope to motivate further research in the area.

Using Mobile Agents in Vehicular Networks for Data Processing

Due to recent advances in communications and computing devices, vehicular networks are attracting a lot of research attention. In a vehicular ad hoc network the nodes are vehicles which communicate among themselves by using shortrange wireless communications. These vehicles can store and share certain data (e.g., regarding the surrounding traffic and environment) which can be used, for example, to develop a wide range of applications to provide the driver with different services related to safety, traffic information, entertainment, etc. The data needed by these applications can be obtained by processing suitable queries in the vehicular network. However, a number of difficulties arise from the point of view of data management. An important challenge is how to communicate a query to the relevant vehicles, retrieve the relevant data from such a distributed and highly dynamic network, and bring back those data to the vehicle that originated the query. In this proposal, we will study the suitability of mobile agent technology to accomplish these tasks, as mobile agents could help thanks to their adaptability to mobile environments and other features, such as their mobility, autonomy or intelligence.

An approach driven by mobile agents for data management in vehicular networks

In the last years, and thanks to improvements on computing and communications technologies, wireless networks formed by vehicles (called vehicular networks) have emerged as a key topic of interest. In these networks, the vehicles can exchange data by using short-range radio signals in order to get useful information related to traffic conditions, road safety, and other aspects. The availability of different types of sensors can be exploited by the vehicles to measure many parameters from their surroundings. These data can then be shared with other drivers who, on the other side, could also explicitly submit queries to retrieve information available in the network. This can be a challenging task, since the data is scattered among the vehicles belonging to the network and the communication links among them have usually a short life due to their constant movement.In this paper, we use mobile agent technology to help to accomplish these tasks, since mobile agents have a number of features that are very well suited for mobile environments, such as autonomy, mobility, and intelligence. Specifically, we analyze the benefits that mobile agents can bring to vehicular networks and the potential difficulties for their adoption. Moreover, we describe a query processing approach based on the use of mobile agents. We focus on range queries that retrieve interesting information from the vehicles located within a geographic area, and perform an extensive experimental evaluation that shows the feasibility and the interest of the proposal.

Dear Mobile Agent, Could You Please Find Me a Parking Space?

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a great interest in the last years due to their potential utility for drivers in applications that provide information about relevant events (accidents, emergency brakings, etc.), traffic conditions or even available parking spaces. To accomplish this, the vehicles exchange data among them using wireless communications that can be obtained from different sources, such as sensors or alerts sent by other drivers. In this paper, we propose searching of parking spaces by using a mobile agent that jumps from one vehicle to another to reach the parking area and obtain the required data directly. We perform an experimental evaluation with promising results that show the feasibility of our proposal.

Towards Spatial Crowdsourcing in Vehicular Networks Using Mobile Agents

In the last years, the automotive industry has shown interest in the addition of computing and communication devices to cars, thanks to the technological advances in these fields but also to meet the increasing demand of “connected” applications and services. Although vehicular networks have not been fully developed yet, they could be used in a near future as a means to provide a number of interesting applications and services that need the exchange of data among vehicles and other data sources.