Edinburgh Napier University

  The purpose of MARIAN is to investigate the degree of suitability for mobile agent technology in routing, topology discovery, and automatic network reconfiguration in ad-hoc networks. This research proposes to assess different models of the usage of static and mobile agents to determine the best route through ad-hoc networks. The determination of the best route is not an easy process, and requires research into the best metrics to identify the best path, such as network performance, processing power, node’s identification, costs, and so on. In this paper we present a framework for MARIAN. The architecture consists of three layers and shapes a pyramid. Each one of the layers is presented in detail in this paper. The bottom layer consists of all hosts in an ad-hoc networks. The middle layer implements a static and mobile approach. This is due to the fact that for a set of applications the static approach may be the most suitable while for another the mobile approach may be suitable. The top layer is the core layer and is a hybrid approach of static and mobile approach. These models will be appraised in terms of performance, reconfigurability, and easy of installation.