Mobile Agents Rendezvous in Networks Despite a Malicious Agent

Abstract

The use of mobile agents, i.e., autonomous software entities , finds its application in many settings such as Network Maintenance, Electronic commerce and Intelligent search. Given a network, we have a set of mobile agents that moves from node to node in order to achieve a common task. Security is an important issue that can arise in such environment and that has been widely studied in literature. In particular, it is important to study the problem of having a host or an agent that hinders or harms the honest agents in their tasks. In this thesis we consider a scenario in which one of the mobile agents may behave maliciously and thus act in order to prevent the other agents to complete their goal. We study the Rendezvous problem,i.e., the problem of gathering a set of mobile agents at a single node of a network, starting from a initial scattered configuration and despite the presence of a Malicious agent, and in particular, we propose a novel solution in the bidirectional hypercube network.