Efficient Routing of Mobile Agents in a Stochastic Network

Authors: Amir Elalouf, Eugene Levner, and T.C.E. Cheng

Polibits, Vol. 47, pp. 61-66, 2013.

Abstract: Mobile agents are autonomous programs that may be dispatched through computer networks. Using a mobile agent is a potentially efficient method to perform transactions and retrieve information in networks. Unknown congestion in a network causes uncertainty in the routing times of mobile agents so the routing of mobile agents cannot rely solely on the average travel time. In this paper we deal with a given stochastic network in which the mobile agent routing time is a random variable. Given pre-specified values R and PR, the objective is to find the path with the minimum expected time under the constraint that the probability that the path time is less than R is at least PR. We show that this problem is NP-hard, and construct an exact pseudo-polynomial algorithm and an ε-approximation algorithm (FPTAS) for the problem.

Keywords: Agent-based architecture, fast routing algo¬rithm, FPTAS, stochastic routing

PDF: Efficient Routing of Mobile Agents in a Stochastic Network
PDF: Efficient Routing of Mobile Agents in a Stochastic Network