The Effect of Agents’ Diversities on the Running Time of the Random Walk-Based Rendezvous Search

Abstract

A rendezvous search aims to efficiently meet multiple searchers existing on different nodes on a network. The blind type of a rendezvous search is lightweight since it only uses a part of network information (adjacent information of each node), and is expected to use for various kinds of networks. As such a blind rendezvous search, we have proposed a random walk-based rendezvous search (RRS) that utilizes agents performing the random walks with the preferential selection of a high degree node. In our previous work, we have conducted the analysis and the experiment of an RRS to clarify its characteristics, under the simple circumstance where all agents start at the same time, and move every unit time by random walks with the same stochastic rule for selecting a next node from adjacent nodes. In this paper, as the first step to understand an RRS under the complex circumstances, we investigate the effect of agents’ diversities on the running time of an RRS through several experiments. As the result of experiments, we clarify the following things: (a) the running time of RRSes is almost the same when agents start random walks from different nodes at different times, (b) the difference of the stochastic rules to select a next node from adjacent nodes greatly affects the running time of an RRS, and (c) the difference of the frequencies of moving random walk agents greatly affects the running time of an RRS.