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 short-range 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.