DNAgents: Genetically Engineered Intelligent Mobile Agents

Mobile agents are a useful paradigm for network coding providing many advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, widespread adoption of mobile agents has been hampered by the disadvantages, which could be said to outweigh the advantages. There is a variety of ongoing work to address these issues, and this is discussed. Ultimately, genetic algorithms are selected as the most interesting potential avenue. Genetic algorithms have many potential benefits for mobile agents. The primary benefit is the potential for agents to become even more adaptive to situational changes in the environment and/or emergent security risks. There are secondary benefits such as the natural obfuscation of functions inherent to genetic algorithms. Pitfalls also exist, namely the difficulty of defining a satisfactory fitness function and the variable execution time of mobile agents arising from the fact that it exists on a network. DNAgents 1.0, an original application of genetic algorithms to mobile agents is implemented and discussed, and serves to highlight these difficulties. Modifications of traditional genetic algorithms are also discussed. Ultimately, a combination of genetic algorithms and artificial life is considered to be the most appropriate approach to mobile agents. This allows the consideration of agents to be organisms, and the network to be their environment. Towards this end, a novel framework called DNAgents 2.0 is designed and implemented. This framework allows the continual evolution of agents in a network without having a seperate training and deployment phase. Parameters for this new framework were defined and explored. Lastly, an experiment similar to DNAgents 1.0 is performed for comparative purposes against DNAgents 1.0 and to prove the viability of this new framework

Using mobile agents for network resource discovery in peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-Peer networks continue to grow in popularity. However network resource discovery still remains a substantial problem within them. In this paper we will cover some of the more popular current solutions to this problem. We will then propose a mobile agent based solution to allow for dynamic network resource discovery. Keywords: Mobile Agents, Resource Discovery, Peer-to-Peer

A Quantitative Analysis of Performance in a Multi-Protocol Ad Hoc 802.11b-based Wireless Local Network

The popularity of the Internet and the growing demand for ubiquitous connectivity accelerate the need for viable wireless local area network (WLAN) solutions. As a consequence, increasing number of manufacturers have adopted the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11a/b/g set of WLAN standards and produced inexpensive wireless products to expand capabilities of existing LANs. IEEE 802.11 b wireless products are widely accepted. Mobile ad hoc networks, a variant of the 802.11 standards, exist without the requirement for a wired infrastructure or host to provide routing, connectivity, and maintenance services. Because of the high variability of environments in which ad hoc networks operate, numerous routing protocols are proposed. Research indicates that these protocols are unsuited for efficient operation in multiple environments. In this investigation, the author examined the effect of multiple protocols on throughput and end-to-end delay in simulated ad hoc networks. The author selected the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR) routing protocols for this research. The outcomes from the simulations conducted indicated increased end-to-end delay and reduced packet throughput as a result of the mixed populations of the AODV and DSR ad hoc routing protocols. The results also indicated that increasing node density and velocity improved packet throughput and reduced end-to-end delay

Integração inter-empresarial do negócio em rede

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Área de Especialização de Sistemas Digitais e Informática Industrial). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Agents mobiles coopérants pour les environnements dynamiques

A partir de l'étude de la mobilité dans les paradigmes de programmation pour les systèmes distribués et des différents architectures réseaux, et principalement celles sans-fils, nous avons pu identifier le problème de la gestion des unités mobiles (PDA, smartphone, ...) lorsque l'on souhaite les intégrer dans Internet. Leurs déplacements introduisent un fort dynamisme matériel qui ne permet plus d'utiliser les techniques classiques d'un internet et d'obtenir un système gérant globalement la localisation de toutes les unités. Cette absence de gestion globale remet en cause les méthodes classiques de conception fondées sur un système offrant une représentation stable de l'environnements. Dans ce contexte, nous avons étudié la conception basée sur les agents mobiles, programmes se déplaçant de site en site de manière autonome, afin de démontrer leur utilité dans des environnements dynamiques à l'échelle d'Internet, et ce, en l'absence d'un système capable de gérer la localisation globale. ABSTRACT : From the study of programming paradigms used in distributed systems and recent network architectures, especially wireless ones, we distinguish the problem of mobile unit management (PDA, smartphone, ...) when they are involved in the Internet. Their mobility introduces a high physical dynamism which leads to reconsider design patterns used in an intranet. Such systems do not allow to provide a global view of the distribution. This absence of global view implies to revisit classical design approaches based upon a system supplying a stable context representation. Therefore, we have studied a design approach based upon mobile agents, namely programs moving from site to site in an autonomous way. We demonstrate their usefulness in such dynamic environments at large scale in the Internet, in which there exits non global location service