Modeling mobile agents in vehicular networks

Vehicular networks (VANETs) are mobile ad hoc networkswhere vehicles that are near each other can exchange data by usingwireless communications. Advances in mobile communication technolo-gies have spurred significant research in the exploitation of these types ofnetworks to develop different kinds of data services for drivers. However,these networks are also highly-dynamic and several data managementchallenges arise to realize their full potential.We have proposed the use of mobile agent technology for efficient dis-tributed query processing in VANETs. Mobile agents are software entitieswith the capability to hop among nearby cars in such a way that theycan transport themselves to the vehicles storing relevant data. In thispaper, using Petri nets, we present a formal model of our approach