Dependency of Network Structures in Agent Selection and Deployment

This paper shows that the statistical properties of the network topology are indispensable information for improving performance of multi-agent systems (MASs), though they have not received much attention in previous MAS research. In particular we focus on the applicability of the degree of an agent-the number of links among neighboring agents- to load-balancing for the agent selection and deployment problem. The proposed selection algorithm does not need global information about the network structure and only requires the degree of a server agent and the degrees of the nodes neighboring the server agent. Through simulation of several topologies reproduced by the theoretical network models, we show that the use of the local topological information significantly improves the fairness of the servers even for a large-scale network. We also find that the key mechanisms for load-balancing in a given network topology are highly asymmetric degree characteristics (scale- free) and the negative degree correlation.