Decontaminating a Network from a Black Virus
Jie Cai, Paola Flocchini, Nicola Santoro · International Journal of Networking and Computing · 2014
In this paper, we consider the problem of decontaminating a network from a black virus (BV) using a team of mobile system agents. The BV is a harmful process which, like the extensively studied black hole (BH), destroys any agent arriving at the network site where it resides; when that occurs, unlike a black hole which is static by definition, a BV moves, spreading to all the neighbouring sites, thus increasing its presence in the network. If however one of these sites contains a system agent, that clone of the BV is destroyed (i.e., removed permanently from the system). The initial location of the BV is unknown a priori. The objective is to permanently remove any presence of the BV from the network with minimum number of site infections (and thus casualties). The main cost measure is the total number of agents needed to solve the problem.