Multicast Protocols for Jinni Agents

摘要

We extend the Jinni Agent Programming Infrastructure with a multicast network transport layer. We show that the resulting protocol emulates client/server exchanges while providing high performance multicasting of remote calls to multiple sites. To ensure that our agent infrastructure runs efficiently independently of router-level multicast support, we also describe a blackboard based algorithm for locating a randomly roaming agent for message delivery. Jinni's orthogonal design, separating blackboards from networking and multi-threading, turns out to be easy to adapt to support a generalization of Jinni's Linda based coordination model. The resulting system is particularly well suited for building large scale, agent based, IP transparent, fault tolerant, tele-teaching and shared virtual reality applications.