A heuristic algorithm for designing near-optimal mobile agent itineraries

Several distributed architectures, incorporating mobile agent technology, have been recently proposed to answer the scalability limitations of their centralized counterparts. However, these architectures fail to address scalability problems, when distributed tasks requiring the employment of itinerant agents is considered. This is because they lack mechanisms that guarantee optimization of agents´ itineraries so as to minimize the total migration cost in terms of the round-trip latency and the incurred traffic. This is of particular importance when MAs itineraries span multiple subnets. The work presented herein aspires to address these issues. To that end, we have designed and implemented an algorithm that adapts methods usually applied for addressing network design problems in the specific area of mobile agent itinerary planning. The algorithm not only suggests the optimal number of mobile agents that minimize the overall cost but also constructs optimal itineraries for each of them. The algorithm implementation has been integrated into our mobile agent framework research prototype and tested in real network environments, demonstrating significant cost savings.