Abstract
Recently, there has been increasing interest in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) that are constructed by mobile sensor nodes held by ordinary people, and it has led to a new concept called urban sensing. In such MWSNs, mobile sensor nodes densely exist, and thus, there are basically many sensor nodes that can sense a geographical point in the entire sensing area. To reduce the communication cost for gathering sensor data, it is desirable to gather the sensor data from the minimum number of mobile sensor nodes which are necessary to guarantee the sensing coverage or the quality of services. In this paper, to achieve this, we propose a data gathering method using mobile agents in dense MWSNs. The proposed method guarantees the sensing coverage of the entire area using mobile agents that autonomously perform sensing operations, transmit sensor data, and move between sensor nodes. By gathering only sensor data generated by sensor nodes where mobile agents are running, our proposed method can achieve efficient gathering of sensor data.