Ant-based approach to mobile agent traversal

Abstract

In construction of the agent-based distributed system, agent traversal is one of the most fundamental building blocks. It is the operation to make each agent visit each node exactly once and return to its originating node. In this paper, we consider the ant-based approach to the agent traversal problem. We present three distributed implementation of the ant system and evaluate their performance by simulation. Moreover, we propose a novel lightweight implementation of the ant system where the unnecessary traffic of network is reduced. The performance of the lightweight implementation is also evaluated by simulation. We show from the simulation results that this implementation achieves drastic reduction of network traffic. © Springer-Verlag 2004.