Decontamination of Arbitrary Networks using a Team of Mobile Agents with Limited Visibility

In this paper, we consider the problem of decontaminating synchronous networks with mobile agents using breadth-first- search (BFS) technique. We consider various networks with different number of home bases to study the relationship between the number of home bases and the mobile agents/steps required to decontaminate. Through experiments, we demonstrate that as the number of home bases increases, the number of mobile agents required decreases in all network topologies considered. We observed that as the number of home bases increases the number of steps taken to decontaminate the network also decreases. The overuse of mobile agents due to the BFS strategy increases with the decrease in the number of contaminated nodes. For synchronous networks, increasing the number of home bases has an impact on the number of mobile agents needed. In particular, we note that this translates to a reduced number of mobile agents required for certain number of home bases.