Improving data collection in complex networks with failure-prone agents via local marking

Previous research studied a problem of data collection in complex networks with failure-prone components using mobile agents and two movement strategies: random and a pheromone-based algorithm. As a main conclusion, a fast data collection implies higher robustness and success rates. In some scale-free networks with a higher standard deviation in the betweenness centrality, random exploration was faster than a pheromone-based algorithm because mobile agents remain re-exploring nodes for more time. This paper presents an improvement to selected movement algorithms to collect data in complex networks in a faster way. The proposed improvement consists of local marks in nodes to avoid re-exploration combined with the previously proposed algorithms. Experiments were performed with different failures rates. Results show that there is a significant difference between the pheromone algorithm with and without local marks providing a higher robustness in data collection tasks in scenarios with a higher standard deviation in the betweenness centrality. Possible applications include data-collection and retrieval in distributed environments like Internet of Things environments (IoT) as well as farms, clusters and clouds.