Autonomic Ranking and Characterization of Data Sources and Query Processing Sites Using Ant Colony Theory

This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of discovering and ranking the characteristics of the data sources and query processing sites in a distributed database system. We model the network as a graph with nodes representing data sources and query processing sites, some of which might be replicated.We introduce a heuristic technique inspired in Ant Colony Theory to dynamically discover,assess and catalog each data source or query-processing site. Our goal is to find possible paths to access the computational resources or data provided by the highest quality sites and define the quality of this sites and data sources. The concept of quality could be defined  in terms of performance, freshness, completeness or other metrics. We describe a simulation of the system using Java CSIM and also a preliminary performance and freshness studies designed to analyze the quality of paths found by the Ant Colony algorithm and the accurate of the freshness estimators. These experiments show  that our approach  is promissory and could do the job than we expect offering the information that the system needs to optimize a query request in a middleware system.