Swarm Based Distributed Search in the AMIGOS Environment

Future user controlled development of telecommunication services combined with powerful terminal equipment results in many heterogeneous services running in a peer-to-peer execution environment. In such a system locating a desired service is challenging. In this paper a swarm based optimization algorithm is presented capable of finding paths of resources in a complex network environment. The algorithm is fully distributed and may be implemented using simple ant-like mobile agents. On the contrary to existing localization mechanisms for peer-to-peer systems the algorithm considers all accessed resources between (and including) the client side and server side when a resource path is evaluated. Scalability is achieved by enabling agents to cooperate during search when they have overlapping search profiles. Results from simulations are promising. The expected cooperative behavior is shown to be present, i.e. a set of near optimal resource paths conforming to a set of different but overlapping search profiles may be found without performance degradation.