Approaches to Fault-Tolerant Mobile Agent Execution

Fault tolerance is fundamental to the further development of mobile agent applications. It ensures that the agent arrives at its destination and thus prevents a partial or complete loss of the agent. This paper surveys the current approaches to fault-tolerant mobile agent execution. Most of these approaches are based on replication. We propose a classification into temporal-replication-based and spatial-replication-based approaches and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches.

[1]  André Schiper,et al.  Modeling fault-tolerant mobile agent execution as a sequence of agreement problems , 2000, Proceedings 19th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems SRDS-2000.

[2]  Amy L. Murphy,et al.  Reliable Communication for Highly Mobile Agents , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[3]  Fred B. Schneider,et al.  NAP: practical fault-tolerance for itinerant computations , 1999, Proceedings. 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (Cat. No.99CB37003).

[4]  Ajay Mohindra,et al.  Exploiting non-determinism for reliability of mobile agent systems , 2000, Proceeding International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. DSN 2000.

[5]  Markus Straßer,et al.  A fault-tolerant protocol for providing the exactly-once property of mobile agents , 1998, Proceedings Seventeenth IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (Cat. No.98CB36281).

[6]  Hartmut Vogler,et al.  Distributed transaction processing as a reliability concept for mobile agents , 1997, Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems.

[7]  Radu Popescu-Zeletin,et al.  An Approach for Providing Mobile Agent Fault Tolerance , 1998, Mobile Agents.

[8]  Luís Moura Silva,et al.  Fault-tolerant execution of mobile agents , 2000, Proceeding International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. DSN 2000.

[9]  Fred B. Schneider,et al.  Towards Fault-Tolerant and Secure Agentry , 1997, WDAG.

[10]  Markus Straßer,et al.  Reliability Concepts for Mobile Agents , 1998, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[11]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process , 1983, PODS '83.