A Fault-Tolerant Mobile Agent Model in Replicated Secure Services

This paper addresses the fault tolerance and security issues involved in mobile agent applications. The replication and voting are of importance to achieve fault tolerance and security for distributed computing over the Internet. We present our agent replication extension system with voting and evaluate the performance. The system model makes mobile agents fault-tolerant and also detects attacks by malicious hosts. The model is compared with Agent Tcl. As a part of experimental studies, the effects of varying the degree of replication and replication methods are examined. The effects of the voting frequencies and jump times are also studied. Our findings show that replicated computation with voting improve performance by ensuring that slow hosts do not affect the progress of the computation; synchronization delays caused by voting do not have a major effect in our experimentation.