Affiliations: [a] Mobile Computing and Networking Research Lab (LARIM), Department of Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P 6079, Succ Centre-ville, Montreal (QC) H3C 3A7, Canada | [b] Ericsson Research Canada, 8400 Décarie Blvd, Montreal (QC) H3P 2N2, Canada
Abstract: This paper presents an architecture based on mobile agents to search for admissible prices of a specific item among many merchant sites over the Internet. To make the search more efficient, mobile agents collaborate by exchanging information. In this paper, we present and compare two collaboration strategies: blackboard and inter-agent communication. The performance of the presented strategies was investigated regarding the response time and the induced network traffic. For that, we carried out analytical and experimental estimation of the lower and the upper bounds of the average search time and average induced network flow of each proposed algorithm. We also addressed system scalability with respect to the number of involved agents. Experimental results show that collaboration among agents improves performance compared to non-collaborative solutions and that increasing the number of agents does not always guarantee better performance.
Keywords: Price search, data retrieval, mobile agents, collaboration, e-commerce
