An Algorithmic Evaluation of Information Search in a Mobile Agent-Based Demand-Oriented Information Service System

Abstract

The rapid advance in information and communication technology (ICT) has given new impetus to shift the information services paradigm from platform centric to network centric computing. Commercial activity is blooming on the internet. The user or customer has become dynamic and has changing tastes and pattern in the demand of service, and desires the service at any time or place. The service provider therefore has to tailor the service provision format to suit the dynamic nature of users of information services. A business cannot afford to ignore the rapid and evolving nature of its customers. However, the current state of the wide area network services is finding it difficult to respond to constantly changing and heterogeneous demands of modern business, being centralized in nature, with the service provided through a single URL. It is imperative to update the pattern of information service provision and utilization. Faded information field architecture (FIF), reported recently, holds the potential to address these issues, being a demand-oriented architecture. Although research into various aspects of FIF has been reported, we suggest algorithms to characterize the behavior of mobile agents to seek the required information at a given node in the FIF architecture. Simulations were carried out to show the effect of various parameters on the performance of the FIF system.