Forking Agents in Sensor Networks

Abstract

Information about local events are to be distributed by agents in a sensor network. The agents are sent out traveling hop-by-hop into random directions, leaving a path of information behind them in the nodes visited. An arbitrary node requesting for information also emits an agent traveling into a random direction. Though only a fraction of all nodes will contain the requested information the high probability of a requesting agent intersecting the path of an informing colleague is exploited to find the information. A major problem of this approach called Rumor Routing is that it produces a highly non-uniform distribution of information. We have tackled this problem by introducing Forking Agents.