Modeling Mobile Agents in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks (VANETs) are mobile ad hoc networks where vehicles that are near each other can exchange data by using wireless communications. Advances in mobile communication technologies have spurred significant research in the exploitation of these types of networks to develop different kinds of data services for drivers. However, these networks are also highly-dynamic and several data management challenges arise to realize their full potential. We have proposed the use of mobile agent technology for efficient distributed query processing in VANETs. Mobile agents are software entities with the capability to hop among nearby cars in such a way that they can transport themselves to the vehicles storing relevant data. In this paper, using Petri nets, we present a formal model of our approach.