PORTABLE RESOURCE CONTROL FOR MOBILE MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS IN JAVA

摘要

Prevention of denial-of-service attacks is indispensable for distributed multi-agent systems to execute securely. To implement the required defense mechanisms, it is necessary to have support for resource control, i.e., accounting and limiting the consumption of resources like CPU, memory, and threads. Java is the predominant implementation language for mobile agent systems, even though resource control is a missing feature on standard Java platforms. Moreover, prevailing approaches to resource control in Java require substantial support from native code libraries, which is a serious disadvantage with respect to portability, since it prevents the deployment of applications on large-scale heterogeneous networks. This article describes the new resource-aware version of the J-SEAL2 mobile agent kernel. The resource control model is based on a set of requirements, where portability is very significant, as well as a natural integration with the existing programming model.