Engineering a multi-agent system for peer-to-peer video streaming

Advent of technologies like semantic web, multi-agent systems, web mining has changed the internet as knowledge provider. Web personalization offers a solution to the information overload problem in current web by providing users a personalized experience, considering their interest, behavior, context and emotions. Semantic web technology is based on use of software agents, ontologies and reasoning to add meaning to web information. An important technology for achieving personalization is the use of independent intelligent software agents. This work reviews, web personalization in the light of semantic web and software agent technology. A comparative study of recent works in the domain of web personalization has been carried out for this purpose. This review highlights ample scope for application of intelligent agents in the web personalization domain for solving many existing issues like personalized content management, user profile learning, modeling and adaptive interactions with users.

The escalating popularity of multi-agent systems makes it one of the promising technologies that provide the environment for developing collaborative intelligent software systems. We have proposed the light weight and fault tolerant architecture for multi-agent systems. SAGE-Lite is a lightweight context aware multi-agent system which senses the capabilities of the light-weight devices and reacts accordingly. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. The intelligence may be pretty minimal but often will include some degree of learning from past experience. This paper addresses the issues of wireless environment and gives the detailed design of lightweight architecture context-aware light-weight multi-agent system of SAGE-Lite and its evaluation. The main objective is to allow light weight agents to participate in flexible communicating environment. As the system is based on the latest FIPA specifications, agent uses the FIPA-ACL for communication and bit-efficient protocol for encoding and decoding of ACL message

In Multi-Agent System (MAS), developers concentrate on creating design models and evolving them, from higher level models to lower level models, in several steps. Considerable part of MAS implementations is automatically produced from the design models. If a design model contains faults, they are passed to the generated implementations. Practical model validation techniques are required to discover and delete faults in abstract design models. In this paper, we introduce a formal approach for MAS design testing. It specifies a testing process that complements Multi-agent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology and strengthens the mutual relationship between UML and MAS. Besides, it defines a structured and comprehensive testing process for engineering software agents at the design level by providing a systematic way of converting the MAS design models to UML design diagram. Then a Petri Net (PN) diagram is generated from the UML models to simulate the behavior of the MAS system. Finally, because Petri Nets (PNs) are formal models, their analysis techniques can be applied to automatic MAS behavioral testing.

Recently, video streaming services using P2P(Peer-to-Peer) have attracted attention to solve the problem of load concentration on servers and reduce a lot of latency. Many P2P streaming systems, like Coolstreaming, however, have a complicated approach to control playback timings severely. And this leads to less churn resiliency and less adaptability to fluctuation of network traffic. Therefore, we focus on a simple and robust approach to realize “pseudo” streaming with high quality, which is based on BitTorrent. In the existing methods with the simple approach, peers download pieces just closer to playback timings to decrease the playback discontinuity. In contrast, in this paper, we propose a new P2P video streaming system considering the cooperation of three metrics; video structure, playback timings, and pieces dispersion on network. In this system, users vary three piece selections to suit the delivery status. Specifically, users preferentially download pieces which affect the video quality, are closer to playback timings, and improve the delivery efficiency. Moreover, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulation.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies rapidly attracted people and had a big success for file sharing applications as well as for other kinds of applications such as Voice and now video streaming applications. But this success has also an impact on the physical networks, which become more loaded and could lead to a point where the quality of P2P services may decrease. Therefore it is necessary to study solutions that could propose to have a closer relationship between P2P providers and ISPs in such a way that network use could be optimized. This is the goal of this paper, which proposes a P2P video streaming system where both the P2P provider and the ISP have an active role in the peer selection process. After an analysis of real traces of P2P exchanges in the France Telecom network in order to know how P2P traffic behaves, we propose our own P2P video streaming system including the network components (the P2P tracker and the ISP topology server) and the end-users client. A proof-ofconcept of our system and experiments we made in a local tested show that this system is viable.

A key difficulty in the design of multi-agent robotic systems is the size and complexity of the space of possible designs. In order to make principled design decisions, an understanding of the many possible system configurations is essential. To this end, we present a taxonomy that classifies multi-agent systems according to communication, computational and other capabilities. We survey existing efforts involving multi-agent systems according to their positions in the taxonomy. We also present additional results concerning multi-agent systems, with the dual purposes of illustrating the usefulness of the taxonomy in simplifying discourse about robot collective properties, and also demonstrating that a collective can be demonstrably more powerful than a single unit of the collective.

This chapter presents and discusses the Living Systems Technology Suite, LS/TS, a solution for the development and deployment of products and systems based on software agent technology and autonomic computing. LS/TS comprises a software development methodology and a Java-based agent platform with development tools. The focus of this paper is on the LS/TS agent platform: the concepts, API and development tools that support the design and implementation of multi-agent systems are described and discussed. This chapter also lists a few significant challenges that a middleware for multi-agent systems has to face, and also shows how each one of them is addressed by the LS/TS agent platform.

Knowledge based design integrates a broad range of highly specialized knowledge from expert sources to synthesize or refine a design. Knowledge-based design systems automate at least some of these knowledge sources. However, the constant evolution of standards, technologies, and a dynamic marketplace demands a high degree of adaptability in both design expertise and in the process of applying that expertise. The need for diverse, highly sophisticated, and rapidly changing skills and knowledge makes the multiagent paradigm particularly appropriate for knowledge-based design. As researchers apply multiagent technologies to design domains, challenges include supporting interoperability among heterogeneous agents on diverse platforms, coordinating the design process, and managing conflict. This article surveys the state of the art in multiagent systems, through examples of projects and techniques, and then presents several questions that elicit the requirements and goals of a proposed multiagent design application.

Review on Cloud Computing Application in P2P Video Streaming

: Controls research under this program concentrated on the development of a network thermodynamic stabilization framework for hybrid control design of large-scale and multiagent aerospace systems. In particular, we concentrate on hybrid control, hierarchical control, impulsive dynamical systems, nonnegative dynamical systems, compartmental systems, large-scale systems, nonlinear switching control, cooperative control, and adaptive control. Application areas include large flexible interconnected space structures, spacecraft stabilization, cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles, network systems, swarms of air and space vehicle formations, and pharmacological systems.

Adaptation and Evolution in Dynamic Persistent Environments

This paper focuses the development of an adaptive observer-based distributed fault estimation observer (DFEO) for multi-agent nonlinear time-delay systems under a directed communication topology. The process involves constructing a fault estimation observer for each agent based on their relative output estimation errors. An adaptive DFEO design is proposed for multi-agent systems with a directed communication topology. Furthermore, investigating the effect of faulty agents on the criteria of fault detection on healthy agents. The proposed design is represented with Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) to establish a systematic design procedure. The study also includes simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design techniques.

This chapter describes the use of software agents and Web Services to support the formation of Virtual Enterprises. The partners of a Virtual Enterprise are represented as software agents. The AGORA multi-agent architecture is used. The focus of this chapter is on the description of the services provided by each partner and the partner selection process. The concept of Agent Interaction Protocols is used to manage the interactions during the formation of the Virtual Enterprise. An implementation of the ideas and examples from industrial case studies are used for the validation of the approach and discussions. The use of Semantic Web technology and Web Services with multi-agent systems is discussed as the future directions for this work.

The development of theoretical-based methods for the assessment of multi-agent systems properties is of critical importance. This work is a preliminary investigation on methodologies for modeling, analysis and design of multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems are regarded as discrete-event dynamic systems and Petri nets are used as a modeling tool to assess the structural properties of the multi-agent system. Our methodology consists of defining a simple multi-agent system based on the abstract architecture for intelligent agents. The abstract architecture is modeled as a discrete-event system using Petri nets and structural analysis of the net provides an assessment of the communication and coordination properties of the multi-agent system. Deadlock avoidance in the multi-agent system is considered as an initial key property, and it is evaluated using liveness and boundedness properties of the Petri net model.

The action and perception models adopted by state-of- the-art agent programming languages – in the context of Multi-Agent System (MAS) programming – have been conceived mainly to work with exogenous environments, i.e. physical or computational environments completely external to the MAS and then out of MAS design and programming. In this paper we discuss the limits of adopting such models when endogenous environments are considered, i.e. computational environments – often referred also as application environments – that are designed and programmed by MAS developers as a first-class abstraction to encapsulate functionalities useful for agent individual and cooperative activities. In the paper we describe an action and perception model for agent programming languages specifically conceived to be effective for endogenous environments and we discuss its evaluation using CArtAgO environment technology. On the agent side, we focus our attention on programming languages based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) model, taking Jason, 2APL and GOAL as reference case studies.KeywordsEnvironment programmingAction and perceptionAgent Programming Languages CArtAgO