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[ba-ohs-talk] AntHill P2P


http://www.cs.unibo.it/projects/anthill/index.htm
more about it at http://ebiquity.org/article.php?sid=397    (01)

This project represents an approach to P2P based on study of nature's 
original P2P creatures.    (02)

 From the project home page:    (03)

"Anthill is a framework aimed at supporting the design, development and 
analysis of peer-to-peer protocols and algorithms. The goals of Anthill are 
to: (i) provide an environment for simplifying the design and deployment of 
new P2P systems, and (ii) provide a "testbed'' for studying and 
experimenting with P2P systems in order to understand their properties and 
evaluate their performance. Anthill is based on the multi-agent systems 
(MAS) paradigm. A MAS is a collection of autonomous agents that can observe 
their environment and perform simple local computations leading to actions 
based on these observations. The behavior of an agent may be 
non-deterministic and its actions may modify the agent environment as well 
as the agent location within the environment. What distinguishes MAS from 
other agent models is that there is no central coordination of activity. 
MAS often exhibit a property called swarm intelligence whereby a collection 
of simple agents of very limited individual capabilities achieves 
``intelligent'' collective behavior. In this manner, they are able to solve 
problems that are beyond the capabilities or knowledge of individual 
agents. For example, ant colonies, which are natural instances of MAS, are 
known to be capable of solving complex optimization problems including 
those arising in communication networks. In our opinion, MAS can be 
profitably adopted for the design of innovative peer-to-peer algorithms.
Anthill uses terminology derived from the ant colony metaphor. A P2P system 
based on Anthill is composed of a network of interconnected nests. Each 
nest is a peer entity capable of performing computations and hosting 
resources. Nests handle requests coming from users by generating one or 
more ants --- autonomous agents that travel across the nest network trying 
to satisfy the request. Ants interact indirectly with each other by 
modifying their environment by updating the information stored in the 
visited nests. This form of indirect communication, used also by real ants, 
is known as stigmergy."    (04)