The use of mobile software agents is a promising approach to implement services and disseminate data over ad hoc networks. This paper presents an analysis of mobile autonomous agents with different levels of intelligence that allow them to make usage of the positioning information with different complexity in a mobile ad hoc network aiming at efficient data dissemination. This information considers the nodes current and future locations, as well as the route used to reach their destinations, depending on the agents' intelligence. Using this information, the agents decide their movement from node to node during opportunistic connections in order to accomplish their goals related to data dissemination and/or service provisioning. The analysis of this proposal is done in the context of a sensor network application, implemented by sensing services provided by mobile agents, which run on top of an infrastructure-less Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET). Simulation results are presented and discussed to support the proposed ideas. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.