Contract Net Secure Establishment Protocol (CNSEP)

Abstract

In recent years, multi-agent systems have attracted increased interest of researchers. These multi-agent systems are composed of interacting entities known as agents that work together in a concurrent systems to solve a complex problems. These problems can be further subdivided and distributed among other agents to increase the problem solving speed. The vast amount of research has been done for agent communication, along with the semantics of agent communication. As communication is an important aspect for agent interaction in multi agent systems, this paper provides an introduction for secure communication between agents residing in an heterogeneous or distributed environments. In fact, an analytical study of literature indicates that researchers have made attempts to lay a smooth floor for the working components of semantic web but the same careful investigation also reveals the fact that the floor laid is not yet smooth. In this research paper, an attempt is made to present a standard protocol for KQML named as Contract Net Secure Establishment protocol (CNSEP). The protocol is used to perform a communication between two or many multi-agent systems. The major emphasis is done on the security of messages that is being transferred or shared between agent systems. This protocol has been developed using Contract Net Trust Establishment Protocol (CNTEP) as a reference. The main aim of this research work is to enhance existing CNTEP protocol by imposing security mechanism in it and for this a new component i.e. Security agent has been introduced.