Development, Analysis and Evaluation of Performance Models for Mobile Multi-Agent Networks

Abstract

Mobile agents have a number of interesting features such as creation, disposal of agents, execution of services at various network nodes, migration to other network nodes and communication with other agents. Such features are related to the performance area. Based on some examples, scenarios, or case studies, Petri net models (ordinary Petri net, colored Petri net or predicate/transition net), mathematical models,simulationmodelsandqueuingmodelshavebeendevelopedintheliterature.Suchresearchworks concentrate on studying the performance of mobile agent networks with much attention on deadlock problems, dynamic behavior problems and the calculation of response time problems. In order to better understand how to design distributed systems using the mobile agent paradigm and how to build a model with the capability of studying all such performance problems in an easy and a realistic way, we propose a new mobile agent performance model using the capability of the generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN) modeling technique. We amended this model with new mobile agent behaviors to fully describe the dynamic behavior of the mobile agent network when it manipulates parallel/multiple agents, and uses some of the most important agent communications (e.g. remote, local, direct, indirect and parallel). Furthermore, the proposed model describes the creation process of new agents during the migration process, the execution of tasks among the network nodes, the way of handling the agent and its service task ateachnodeandtheinteractionofagroupofagents(asacollectiveresultofthebehaviorsofeachindividual agent). To the best of our knowledge, such aspects are not included into one model because it is difficult to describe all these aspects into one model. Therefore, the developedGSPN mobile modelgivesthe facilityto study the performance of mobile agent networks with more details. In the performance analysis, we developfour studies to investigatetheeffect of differentparameters suchas agent communication time, size ofmobileagent,numberofmobileagentsandnumberofhops ontheperformanceofmobileagentnetworks. Byperformanceofmobileagentnetworks,wemeantheresponsetimeoftheuser'srequest.Tothebestofour knowledge, such four performance studies are not investigated previously by the GSPN modeling technique. Finally, we propose a reduction-modeling methodology to facilitate the modeling process of the practical mobile agent network that incorporates a large number of network nodes, a large number of users,andsubsequentlyalargenumberofparallel/multipleagents.Suchmethodologyreducestheoriginal model to a simpler one while preserving the basic features and properties of the original model.

Performance analysis on mobile agent-based parallel information retrieval approaches

“…Based on the proposed planning algorithm, mobile agents can dynamically decide their routes according to the dynamically changing traffic state of the network for the purpose of a minimum round trip time. [6] proposed a mobile multi-agent network model based on the generalized stochastic Petri-net. The Petri-net model was also used in [21] for investigating the performances of the client/server approach, remote-evaluation approach and mobile-agent approach in information retrieval application.…”

On Instantiation and Integration Commutability of Design Pattern

“…They are recipes of solving particular design problems. They have been widely adopted in many software systems such as embedded real-time system [2], mobile agent application [3], database system [4] and ambient ecology environment [5]. The benefits of design patterns include the reuse of design rather than code, document of expert design experience, record of design tradeoffs, capture of design decisions and improvement of communication.…”