Dynamic agent population in agent-based distance vector routing

Title:

Dynamic agent population in agent-based distance vector routing, Kaizar Amin, Armin Mikler, Prasanna Iyengar. Neural, Parallel & Scientific Computations, special issue on Advances in intelligent systems and applications, Volume 11 ,  Issue 1 & 2  (March 2003) Pages: 127 – 142 . (pdf)

Abstract:

The Intelligent Mobile Agent paradigm can be applied to a wide variety of intrinsically parallel and distributed applications. Network routing is one such application that can be mapped to an agent-based approach. The performance of any agent-based system will depend on the size of its agent population. Although a significant amount of research has been conducted on mobile agent-based systems, little consideration has been given to the importance of dynamically and autonomously adapting the size of the agent population as function of circumstances in the environment. A large number of constituent agents can consume considerable amounts of network resources, thereby impeding the overall performance of the network. Hence, it is imperative to have a control mechanism whereby the agent population can be adjusted in a distributed manner to balance the resource overhead in the network. This paper briefly discusses an agent-based approach to Distance Vector Routing, referred as Agent-based Distance Vector Routing. It also describes a framework for an adaptive approach to control the number of agents in the network using pheromones and discusses its limitations.