An Agent-Based Technique For Network-Wide File Search In Heterogeneous Peer-To-Peer Systems

Heterogeneity is a major characteristic of all modern computer networks, as a consequence of the proliferation of different types of Operating Systems (OS) acting as nodes in such an environment. This presents unique problems to common activities such as locating resources on a network. Agent computing presents us with several solutions when combined with the Peer-to-peer networking to these resource discovery problems. We approach this issue by presenting the solution to a seemingly innocuous problem, i.e., locating a particular file or files that match a given regular expression on the available network.