The 'Two-Hop Principle': Stability of MAS in Communications Networks

A joint university / industry collaboration is investigating the deployment of MAS technology to manage wireless communications networks. These systems are very large and are situated in a chaotic environment which suggests the use of distributed intelligent control that aims to continually improve, whilst not expecting to optimise, network performance. A key problem is ensuring the stability of these large, distributed control systems. A sequence of management systems have been developed over four years from which we have abstracted our `two-hop principle. We conjecture that the principle has wider application to multiagent network management systems. The generic principle is described and experiments are reported to illustrate the stability observed

Nonlinear negotiation approaches for complex-network optimization: a study inspired by Wi-Fi channel assignment

In this paper, we study a problem family inspired by a prominent network optimization problem (graph coloring), enriched and extended towards a real-world application (Wi-Fi channel assignment). We propose a utility model based on this scenario, and we generate an extensive set of test cases, against which we run both a complete information optimizer and two nonlinear negotiation approaches {a hill-climber and an approach based on simulated annealing (SA). We show that, for the larger-scale scenarios, the SA negotiation approach significantly outperforms the optimizer while running in roughly one tenth of the computation time. Also, we point out interesting patterns regarding the relative performance of the two approaches depending on the properties of the underlying graphs.Ministerio de Economía y CompetitividadUniversidad de Alcal