Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

• M. Rahmaninia ¹
• E. Bigdeli ²
• M. Zaker ³

¹ Department of Computer Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Ghasr-E-Shirin Branch, Kermanshah, Iran.

² Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

³ Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Zanjan, Iran.

Abstract

Network environments always can be invaded by intruder agents. In networks where nodes are performing some computations, intruder agents might contaminate some nodes. Therefore, problem of decontaminating a network infected by intruder agents is one of the major problems in these networks. In this paper, we present a distributed asynchronous local algorithm for decontaminating a network. In most of prior algorithms, there is a coordinator agent that starts from a node and decontaminates the network. Since this procedure is handled by an agent and in centralized mode decontamination algorithm is very slow. In our algorithm, the network is decomposed to some clusters and a coordinator is advocated to each cluster. Therefore, there is more than one coordinator that each of them starts from different nodes in the network and decontaminates network, independently. In this case, network is decontaminated faster. In addition, in previous works the upper bound of the number of moves and the number of cleaner agents required to decontaminate network are given only for networks with special structures such as ring or tori while our algorithm establishes these upper bounds on networks with arbitrary structure.

Keywords

• Network decontamination
• Mobile agents
• Distributed algorithm