A Self-Organizing Ant-based Information Gossiping Algorithm for P2P Networks

Abstract

They appeared in our life only few years ago and now they are everywhere: computers have become ubiquitous and, almost, irreplaceable. Classical ways of creating, managing and exchanging information have been progressively replaced by electronic means. Everyday, information diffusion tools like the World Wide Web, Emails, Forums and other Blog software are now commonly used. However, in spite of this plebiscite, computer based information managing still suffers some weaknesses. Mainly, software aimed to do CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) can be blamed for requiring the user to do an effort to use them. In this paper we present an algorithm aimed at perform autonomous selective dissemination of messages within a network. It constitutes the communication layer of our framework called PIAF (”Personal Intelligent Agent Framework”) which is intended to help users transparently share information. This algorithm works in a fully decentralized way, using epidemic diffusion mechanism and artificial ants paradigm to achieve self-organization and information flows management.