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. However, even though previous works have proved the usefulness of mobile agents in wireless environments, the special features of VANETs call for new research efforts. Could mobile agent technology be useful in a VANET? In this paper, we study these issues and illustrate how mobile agents could drive the development of new applications for vehicular networks.