Locating and Repairing Faults in a Network with Mobile Agents

Abstract. We consider a fixed, undirected, known network and a number of "mobile agents" which can traverse the network in synchronized steps. Some nodes in the network may be faulty and the agents are to find the faults and repair them. The agents could be software agents, if the underlying network represents a computer network, or robots, if the underlying network represents some potentially hazardous physical terrain. Assuming that the first agent encountering a faulty node can immediately repair it, it is easy to see that the number of steps necessary and sufficient to complete this task is (n/k + D), where n is the number of nodes in the network, D is the diameter of the network, and k is the number of agents. We consider the case where one agent can repair only one faulty node. After repairing the fault, the agent dies. We show that a simple deterministic algorithm for this problem terminates within O(n/k + D log f/ log log f) steps, where f = min{n/k, n/D}, assuming th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIROCCO
• Authors: Colin Cooper, Ralf Klasing, Tomasz Radzik
• Keywords: Faulty Nodes, Hazardous Physical Terrain, Information Technology, Mobile Agents, SIROCCO 2008