A Pheromone-Based Coordination Mechanism Applied in Peer-to-Peer

In this paper, we discuss the principle of synthetic pheromones, which we view as a high level coordination mechanism suitable for scalable, distributed systems, such as peer to peer systems. We present a software abstraction for the application of synthetic pheromones, building on an existing coordination mechanism, objectspaces. The coordination principle is evaluated on the problem of search in a file-sharing P2P system.