major steps in greater detail upon starting at block 210 the topology tuner agent 20 first obtains information about the current topology of relationships in the system 10 this may take the form of an exhaustive list of all relationships between agents 40 in the system 10 possibly labeled with identifiers to distinguish between different types of relationship this information can be conveniently represented as a graph in which the agents 40 are nodes and relationships are arcs connecting nodes alternatively the topology information may be represented by statistical measures of system topology such as the distribution of the number relationships the agents 40 have for example the topology tuner agent 20 may construct a histogram of the number of relationships the agents 40 are in in such a histogram the ordinate or x coordinate is the number of relationships and the abscissa or y coordinate gives the number of agents found to be in that number of relationships to determine whether the system topology was more scale free or random in character the topology tuner agent 20 compares the shape of the histogram against two alternative representations the gaussian distribution and the power law distribution using conventional statistical curve fitting techniques the closer the histogram is to a gaussian distribution the more u201c random u201d is the topology while histograms that resemble the power law distribution indicate a scale free topology a preferred method of gathering this topology information is shown in fig3 and is discussed below having gathered the topology information at block 220 the topology tuner agent 20 determines what type of tuning should be performed this may be accomplished by starting with a high level policy or.