During and after a disaster, the perceived quality of communication networks often becomes remarkably degraded with an increased ratio of packet losses due to physical damages of the networking equipment, disturbance to the radio frequency signals, continuous reconfiguration of the routing tables, or sudden spikes of the network traffic, e.g., caused by the increased user activity in a post-disaster period. Several techniques have...

Every node of an edge-weighted tree network contains a data packet. At some nodes are placed mobile agents, each one possessing an amount of energy (not necessarily the same for all agents). While walking along the network, the agents spend the energy proportionally to the distance traveled and collect copies of the data packets present at the visited network nodes. An agent visiting a node deposits there copies of all currently...