Summary A distributed system consists of a collection of autonomous heterogeneous resources that provide resource sharing and a common platform for running parallel compute‐intensive applications. The different application characteristics combined with the heterogeneity and performance variations of the distributed system make it difficult to find the optimal set of needed resources. When deployed, user applications are usually handled by application domain experts or system administrators who depending on the infrastructure provide a scheduling strategy for selecting the best candidate resource over a set of available resources. However, the provided strategy is usually generic, aimed at handling a wide array of applications and does not take into consideration specific application resource requirements. As such, an intelligent method for selecting the best resources based on expert knowledge is needed. In this paper, we propose a neural network‐based multi‐agent resource selection technique capable of mimicking the services of an expert user. In addition, to cope with the geographical distribution of the underlying system, we employ a multi‐agent coordination mechanism. The proposed neural network‐based scheduling framework combined with the multi‐agent intelligence is a unique approach to efficiently deal with the resource selection problem. Results run on a simulated environment show the efficiency of our proposed method. Several scheduling simulations were conducted to compare the performance of some conventional resource selection methods against the proposed agent‐based neural network technique. The results obtained indicate that the agent‐based approach outperformed the classical algorithms by reducing the amount of time required to search for suitable resources irrespective of the resource size. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collectionof wireless nodes, which works well only if those mobile nodes aregood and behave cooperatively. The lack of infrastructuresupport and resource constraint is the key issue that causesdishonest and non-co-operative nodes. Therefore, MANET isvulnerable to serious attacks. To reduce the hazards from suchnodes and enhance the security of the network, this paperextends an Ad hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector(AOMDV) Routing protocol, named as Trust-based Secured Adhoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (TS-AOMDV), whichis based on the nodes' routing behavior. The proposed TSAOMDVaims at identifying and isolating the attacks such asflooding, black hole, and gray hole attacks in MANET. With thehelp of Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and trust-based routing, attack identification and isolation are carried out in two phases ofrouting such as route discovery and data forwarding phase. IDSfacilitates complete routing security by observing both controlpackets and data packets that are involved in the routeidentification and the data forwarding phases. To improve therouting performance, the IDS integrates the measured statisticsinto the AOMDV routing protocol for the detection of attackers. This facilitates the TS-AOMDV to provide better routingperformance and security in MANET. Finally, the Trust basedSecured AOMDV, TS-AOMDV is compared with the existingAOMDV through the NS2 based simulation model. Theperformance evaluation reveals that the proposed TS-AOMDVimproves the performance in terms of throughput by 57.1%more than that of an AOMDV under adversary scenario. Thesimulated results show that the TS-AOMDV outperforms theAOMDV routing protocol.

Summary In grid computing environment, several classes of multi‐component applications exist. These types of applications may often require additional resources of different types that go beyond what is available in any of the sites making up the grid resource composition. The heterogeneity nature of both the user application and the computing environment makes this a challenging problem. However, the current off‐the‐shelf scheduling software can hardly cope with these diversities in distributed computing application frameworks. Therefore, there is the need for an adequate scheduling system that would grant simultaneous or coordinated access to application of multi‐component nature that requires resources of possibly multiple types, in multiple locations, managed by different resource providers. The main focus of this paper is to develop a mobile agent scheduling model that addresses the aforementioned challenge. A scheduling policy that pertains to job scheduling and resource allocation is proposed. The scheduling policy treats different multi‐component applications requiring diverse heterogeneous resources fairly. The policy is used by mobile agents to schedule user applications and to also find available and suitable distributed resource that are capable of executing user application at a very minimal time. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research studies show that energy consumption in communication networks is mainly related to active network elements such as communication links. Based on this approach, several energy management techniques, generally known as green techniques, have been proposed. Their main goal is to minimize energy consumption by routing network traffic through a set of network resources and powering off the remaining unused resources. However, this approach imposes a signaling overhead on the routing system due to selectively powering off/on the network resources. In this work, we investigate the trade-off between energy efficiency and signaling overhead in a software defined network (SDN) domain with a single controller. To this end, we formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) problem whose objective function is to minimize the control overhead by taking into account the total energy consumption of the network. We then propose two polynomial-time heuristic algorithms to find near-optimal solutions for the problem. We evaluate the performance of our heuristic algorithms by comparison with the results obtained from our ILP formulation using optimization software CPLEX.

We formulate a scheduling problem that takes into account different hardware delays experienced by the secondary users (SUs) in a centralized cognitive radio network (CRN) while switching to different frequency bands. We propose a polynomial-time suboptimal algorithm to address our formulated scheduling problem. We evaluate the impact of varying switching delay, number of frequencies, and number of SUs. Our simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm is robust to changes in the hardware spectrum switching delay and its performance is very close to its upper bound. We also compare our proposed method with the corresponding constant switching delay-based algorithm and demonstrate that our suggestion of taking into account the different hardware delays while switching to different frequency bands is essential for scheduling in CRNs.

The field of information technology is growing very quickly, and so there are more and more regular updates. At the same time, computer viruses are also on the increase, and people are now even complaining that attacks on computers are mostly from within the intranet structure. So, if we are able to update the signature files of the anti-virus software that exists on the various computers that are used by the various members of the locality concerned, we can prevent the problems of viruses to some extent. In order to do this, nowadays, system administrators send reminders to the people concerned, or else the computers have to be set to update every few days or so. These systems have their own drawbacks. To avoid this hazard, we provide an option for active packet-oriented automatic signature file updating.