Adaptive Agent-Based Self-Organization for Robust Hierarchical Topologies

Abstract

Virtual organizations in large-scale distributed environments can organize their communication in a hierarchical topology (i.e., trees). However, such topologies can be unreliable as local failures have a global impact in the organization. Hierarchical topologies need to adapt continuously to changes of the underlying environment. Pro-active and re-active self-organization can make such topologies highly robust. This paper proposes AETOS, the Adaptive Epidemic Tree Overlay Service. AETOS is a new agent-based approach for building and maintaining on-demand robust tree topologies that structure communication. Agents are pro-actively (self)-organized appropriately in a tree to minimize the effect of failures. In addition, they re-actively rewire their connections to reflect changes in the environment. The self-organization model, the control of the system and an illustrative example are discussed in this paper.