Garbage Collection Protocol of Fault Tolerance Information in Multi-agent Environments

Existing distributed systems have higher probability of failures occurrence than stand-alone system, so many fault tolerant techniques have been developed. Because of insufficient storage resulting from the increased fault tolerance information stored, the performance of system has been degraded. To avoid performance degradation, it needs delete useless fault tolerance information. In this paper, we propose a garbage collection algorithm for fault tolerance information. And we define and design the garbage collection agent for garbage collection of fault tolerance information, the information agent for management of fault tolerant data, and the facilitator agent for communication between agents. Also, we propose the garbage collection algorithm using the garbage collection agent. For rollback recovery, we use independent checkpointing protocol and sender based pessimistic message logging protocol. In our proposed garbage collection algorithm, the garbage collection, information, and facilitator agent is created with process, and the information agent constructs domain knowledge with its checkpoints and non-determistic events. And the garbage collection agent decides garbage collection time, and it deletes useless fault tolerance information in cooperation with the information and facilitator agent. For propriety of proposed garbage collection technique using agents, we compare domain knowledge of system that performs garbage collection after rollback recovery and domain knowledge of system that doesn't perform garbage collection.