Mobile agents for locating documents in ad hoc networks

Abstract

The wide availability of mobile devices equipped with wireless communication capabilities results in highly dynamic communities of mobile users. An interesting application in such an environment is decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing. Locating files in a highly dynamic network while minimizing the consumption of scarce resources is challenging. Since the availability of files changes significantly over time, an asynchronous approach to searching is promising. In this paper, we show why existing file sharing systems cannot be used here and introduce our approach based on mobile agents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.