I would first like to thank my advisor, Shlomo Zilberstein. Shlomo has supplied an endless repository of knowledge about the field and has taught me so much about how to both conduct and present research. Shlomo’s guidance has provided the perfect balance of research direction and freedom. In addition, it has been a pleasure to be part of the Resource Bounded Reasoning (RBR) lab at the University of Massachusetts. The time spent in Shlomo’s lab has been fun as well as fruitful. I would also like to thank my previous advisor at Tufts, Jim Schmolze, who was taken from this world too soon. Jim introduced me to the POMDP, taught me LISP, and his enthusiasm for the field was always contagious. I would like to thank Victor Lesser. Victor’s advice has proven invaluable, he has always been able to view research questions in just the right way, or to provide just the

We identify the trust management problem as a distinct and important component of security in network services. Aspects of the trust management problem include formulating security policies and security credentials, determining whether particular sets of credentials satisfy the relevant policies

Abstract. GLS is a new distributed location service which tracks mobile node locations. GLS combined with geographic forwarding allows the construction of ad hoc mobile networks that scale to a larger number of nodes than possible with previous work. GLS is decentralized and runs on the mobile

This paper proposes a clustering approach to parameter estimation in distributed sensor networks. The proposed approach is an alternative to the conventional centralized and decentralized approaches. This is made possible by the unique adaptive estimation architecture, U-SHAPE, stemming from set

We introduce Tarzan, a peer-to-peer anonymous network layer that provides generic IP forwarding. Unlike prior anonymizing layers, Tarzan is flexible, transparent, decentralized, and highly scalable. Tarzan achieves these properties by building anonymous IP tunnels between an open-ended set of peers

Consider a set of sensors that receive observations from the environment and transmit finite-valued messages to a fusion center that makes a final decision on one out of M alternative hypotheses. The problem is to provide rules according to which the sensors should decide what to transmit, in order

covering all regions. In fact, the implementation is delegated to each region, a case study of real decentralisation, and the opposite for example of the UK situation, where the tax is set and administered by the Treasury. We first provide a descriptive analysis of the regional trends over the years

The problem of deriving joint policies for a group of agents that maximize some joint reward function can be modeled as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Yet, despite

Market price systems constitute a well-understood class of mechanisms that under certain conditions provide effective decentralization of decision making with minimal communication overhead. In a market-oriented programming approach to distributed problem solving, we derive the activities

for such applications: it refers to a set of functions that provide components of a distributed system access to global information including network size, average load, average uptime, location and description of hotspots, and so on. Local access to global information is often very useful, if not indispensable