An Ecological Approach to Agent Population Management

The problem of maintaining a desired number of mobile agents on a network is not trivial, especially if what is required is a completely decentralized solution. Decentralized control makes a system more robust and less susceptible to partial failures. The problem of agent population management is exacerbated on wireless ad hoc networks where host mobility can result in significant changes in the network size and topology. System stability is also of critical importance. This paper analyzes the stability of a previously proposed ecology-inspired approach to agent population management, and proposes improvements. The stability of the new ecology based strategy is proved theoretically, and the conclusions are verified with a set of experiments.