A Review of Computation Solutions by Mobile Agents in an Unsafe Environment

Exploration in an unsafe environment is one of the major problems that can be seen as a basic block for many distributed mobile protocols. In such environment we consider that either the nodes (hosts) or the agents can pose some danger to the network. Two cases are considered. In the first case, the dangerous node is a called black hole, a node where incoming agents are trapped, and the problem is for the agents to locate it. In the second case, the dangerous agent is a virus; an agent moving between nodes infecting them, and the problem is for the “good” agents to capture it, and decontaminate the network. In this paper, we present several solutions for a black–hole and network decontamination problems. Then, we analyze their efficiency. Efficiency is evaluated based on the complexity, and the effort is in the minimization of the number of simultaneous decontaminating elements active in the system while performing the decontamination techniques. Keywords—Distributed algorithm; Mobile Agent; Network Decontamination; Black Hole Search; and Network Exploration