d-Agent: an approach to mobile agent planning for distributed information retrieval

Owing to advances in home networking, Internet, and mobile computing technology, the retrieval of information that is required in a timely manner has increased in importance for both the home and business user. This type of information can usually be delivered to users within the required time. Therefore, a retrieval service needs to be able to supply the required information to users within a specified time given by the user, and at the same time, it needs to have minimum system overheads from network traffic when performing the retrieval task for an anticipated increasing number of users. In this paper, we propose a new agent-planning algorithm, called d-Agent, for distributed information retrieval. This planning algorithm has two goals: (1) to guarantee a given turn-around time; (2) to schedule mobile agents (the number of agents and each agent's itinerary) optimally while maintaining low system overheads. Although the algorithm tends to slightly increase the planning cost because of these two requirements, a simulation study shows that our algorithm is practical and realistic, and can be directly applied to distributed information retrieval with deadline constraints.