As computer networks (and computational grids) become increasingly complex, the problem of allocating resources within such networks, in a distributed fashion, will become more and more of a design and implementation concern. This is especially true where the allocation involves distributed collections of resources rather than just a single resource, where there are alternative patterns of resources with different levels of utility that can satisfy the desired allocation, and where this allocation process must be done in soft real-time. Distributed Sensor Networks is the...

This book frames a peer-to-peer information retrieval problem as a multi-agent framework and attacks it from an organizational perspective by exploring various adaptive, self-organizing topological organizations, designing appropriate coordination strategies, and exploiting learning techniques to create more accurate routing policy for large-scale agent organizations. In addition, a reinforcement-learning based approach is developed in this thesis to take advantage of the run-time characteristics of P2P IR systems, including environmental parameters, bandwidth usage, and historical...

Distributed Sensor Networks is the first book of its kind to examine solutions to this problem using ideas taken from the field of multiagent systems. The field of multiagent systems has itself seen an exponential growth in the past decade, and has developed a variety of techniques for distributed resource allocation.
Distributed Sensor Networks contains contributions from leading, international researchers describing a variety of approaches to this problem based on examples of implemented systems taken from a common distributed sensor network...