FAULT-TOLERANT MOBILE AGENTS COMPUTING

Reliability is a vital issue in the deployment of mobile agent systems (MASs), which are meant to provide a distributed computing infrastructure for supporting applications in which components can move freely in heterogeneous environments. Design and implementation of mechanisms to relocate computations requires a careful consideration of fault tolerance, which is an essential component of reliability, especially on open networks like the Internet. Mobile agent (MA) fault tolerance requires mechanisms for making agents persistent, for reactivating them and their state activity after a failure, and for reliably transporting them between various agent hosts (AHs). In this paper, we propose several mechanisms to take care of the above problems. These are meant for tolerating host, communication and agent failures on a network and recovering agents and AHs from them. They are based on a novel three-layered approach to fault-tolerance, which avoids the single point failures of centralized systems, while still maintaining the scalability of distributed systems. The proposed techniques have been implemented and tested on PMADE and the results of a comparison of these techniques, with some existing ones, is also reported.

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