A new approach for mobile agent fault-tolerance and reliability using distributed systems

摘要

Mobile agents have attracted considerable interest in recent years. In the context of mobile agents, fault tolerance is crucial to enable the integration of mobile agent technology into today's business applications. To further develop mobile agent technology, reliability mechanisms such as fault tolerance and transaction support are required. For this purpose, we first identify two basic requirements for fault-tolerant mobile agent execution: (1) non-blocking (i.e., a single failure does not prevent progress of the mobile agent execution); and (2) exactly-once (i.e., multiple executions of the agent are prevented). To achieve fault tolerance for the agent system, especially for the agent transfer to a new host, we use distributed transaction processing. This paper proposes a novel approach to fault-tolerant mobile agent execution, which is based on modeling agent execution as a sequence of agreement problems. Each agreement problem is one instance of the well-understood consensus problem. Our solution does not require a perfect failure detection mechanism, while preventing blocking and ensuring that the agent is executed exactly once.