Recently, there has been a great interest in the development of protocols and data management techniques for vehicular networks (VANETs). In a VANET, the vehicles form a wireless ad hoc network where different types of useful data can be exchanged by using the dynamic links that a vehicle can establish with its neighboring vehicles. While this offers opportunities to develop useful applications, many research challenges arise from the point of view of data management.In this paper, we propose the use of cars equipped with sensors in a VANET for environment monitoring. Our approach is based on mobile agents, which jump from car to car as necessary to reach the area of interest and keep themselves in that area. Thus, relying on an expensive fixed infrastructure of sensors is avoided. Instead, any area can be monitored with low cost as long as there are enough vehicles traversing it. We present experiments that compare different traveling strategies for the agents.

In the last years, and thanks to the improvements on computing and communications technologies, wireless networks formed by vehicles (called vehicular networks) have risen as a key topic of interest. In these networks, the vehicles can exchange data with others by using short-range radio signals in order to get useful information related to traffic conditions, road safety, and others. The availability of different types of sensors can be exploited by the vehicles to measure many parameters from their surroundings. These data can then be shared with other drivers who, on the other side, could also explicitly submit queries to retrieve information available in the network. This can be a challenging task, since the data is scattered among the vehicles belonging to the network and the communication links among them have usually a short life due to their constant movement.In this paper, we use the technology of mobile software agents to help to accomplish these tasks, since they have a number of features that are very well suited for their use in mobile environments, such as their autonomy, mobility, and intelligence. Specifically, we analyze the benefits that mobile agents can bring to vehicular networks and the potential difficulties for their adoption. Moreover, we describe a query processing approach based on the use of mobile agent technology. We focus on range queries that retrieve interesting information from the vehicles located within a geographic area and present an extensive experimental evaluation that shows the feasibility and the interest of the proposal.

Abstract-Mobile agent technology has traditionally been recognized as a very useful approach to build applications for mobile computing and wireless environments. However, only a few studies report practical experiences with mobile agents in a mobile medium. This leads us to the following question: can current mobile agent platforms be used effectively in environments with mobile devices?In this paper, we study existing mobile agent platforms by analyzing if they are suitable or not in a mobile environment. We identify some key missing features in the platforms and highlight the requirements and challenges that lie ahead. With this work, we expose existing problems and hope to motivate further research in the area.

In the last years, the automotive industry has shown interest in the addition of computing and communication devices to cars, thanks to technological advances in these fields, in order to meet the increasing demand of "connected" applications and services. Although vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have not been fully developed yet, they could be used in a near future as a means to provide a number of interesting applications and services that need the exchange of data among vehicles and other data sources. In this paper, we propose a spatial crowdsourcing schema for the opportunistic collection of information within an interest area in a city or region (e.g., measures about the environment, such as the concentration of certain gases in the atmosphere, or information such as the availability of parking spaces in an area), using vehicular ad hoc communications. We present a method that exploits mobile agent technology to accomplish the distributed collection and querying of data among vehicles in such a scenario. Our proposal is supported by an extensive set of realistic simulations that prove the feasibility of the approach.

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