Applet demo of mobile agent network mapping

There should have been an applet displayed here.
But your browser doesn't seem to do applets.
Instead, we'll give you a screen shot.

The view in the window above is a picture of a simulation of 8 mobile agents exploring a network of 60 nodes. Roughly half the modes are moving in space; the dynamic network movement makes the mapping task more challenging. The agents are "conscientious agents", following (roughly) a depth first search strategy - they choose to move to the adjacent note they visited longest ago.

Nodes are drawn in white to grey, the links between them in green. The dark grey circles around the nodes represent their transmit/receive radius. The brightness of each node is a measure of how many agents have yet to discover it - bright areas of the graph are where more exploration is needed. The agents are drawn in orange: you can watch them move around the network.

The code running here is the same code we have used to carry out our experiments. Data collection has been turned off for the demonstration. Also, our results so far are for static network graphs of 250 nodes in a bigger arena - we are just beginning to work on dynamic graphs.

Special Java bug note: there's a good chance that this applet will leave running threads around in your browser after you leave this page, especially if you've restarted the simulator a few times. I'm sorry about that, there's a problem with Java thread management I can't work out. We're not the only ones.