This paper focuses on the design and development of a novel architecture called MARIAN, which utilises static agents, mobile agents, and also a hybrid approach, in order to perform routing, network discovery, and automatic network reconfiguration, in wireless ad-hoc networks. The paper shows that, in most cases, the static agent approach is faster than the mobile agent approach in retrieving data from a wireless remote database. However, if the amount of data to be retrieved is relatively large, such as in the gathering of data for routing information, the mobile agents are more capable of filtering data according to the required preferences. It also shows that the time taken to gather routing information can be significantly reduced using a mobile agent approach, as compared with the static agent approach.