Distributed mobile agents: Classification of models through the construction of topological information

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to make a classification of the existing models for mobile agents and to study the relationship between them. To do that, we consider the problem of collaboratively constructing some topological information and we study this problem under a variety of assumptions on the capabilities of the agents and on the network structure. Distributed models for mobile agents differ from one another on a large number of parameters which can be grouped into two interdependent categories: structure surrounding the agents (e.g. structure of the topology, communication methods, etc.) and the capabilities of the agents (e.g. its a-priori knowledge, etc.). These parameters discern the common traits of the distributed environment problems and we use them to systematically classify the models used in the literature. More precisely, we study the problem of determining the size of the network in some common topologies (rings, meshes, tori) and, through this example, we compare the power of the different models.