MARE: A Fault-Tolerant Mobile Agent System

The replication and voting are of great importance to achieve fault tolerance and security in open distributed systems. We present our replication system with voting, called Mobile Agent Replication Exten- sion (MARE), and evaluate the performance. The system makes mobile agents fault-tolerant and also detects attacks by malicious hosts. The reliability and performance issues involved in mobile agents for Internet applications are explored. As a part of our experimental studies, the ef- fects of varying the degree of replication, passive and active replication methods, and voting frequencies are examined. We quantify our proto- type's performance and conclude with the future directions of our work.