An Efficient Content Search Progress Sharing among Mobile Network Agents

This paper deals with a searching problem of digital content items with mobile agents in the network, the topology of which is assumed to be unknown to the agents in the initial state. We previously proposed a scheme with the use of plural management nodes, to which the agents send their search progress individually. The entire search progress can be shared by all the agents with the use of communications among the management nodes. However, because it takes some time for the progress sharing through the plural management nodes, there often exists a time lag between the actual total search progress and its recognition by the agents. This makes plural agents search the same nodes redundantly, and degrades the total search efficiency. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose an improved content search scheme that manages the search progress by a single node, and discuss the efficiency of the scheme using computer simulations.