Scalable distributed discovery of resource paths in telecommunication networks using cooperative ant-like agents

Future user controlled development of telecommunication services combined with powerful terminal equipment results in many heterogenous services running in a peer-to-peer execution environment. Locating a desired service in such an environment is challenging. We present a swarm based optimization algorithm which is capable of finding paths of resources in a complex network environment. The algorithm is fully distributed and may be implemented using simple ant-like mobile agents. On the contrary to existing localization mechanisms for peer-to-peer systems the algorithm considers all accessed resources between (and including) the client side and server side when a resource path is evaluated. Scalability is achieved by making agents cooperate during search when they have overlapping search profiles. Results from simulations are promising. The expected cooperative behavior is shown to be present, i.e. a set of near optimal resource paths conforming to a set of different but overlapping search profiles may be found with improved performance.