A Sliding-Agent-Group Communication Model for Constructing A Robust Roaming Environment over Internet

摘要

In this paper, a model called SAGCoM (Sliding-Agent Group Communication Model) is proposed for constructing a robust roaming environment over Internet. SAGCoM is based on the concept of agent and group communication. The concept of agent reduces the coupling of two connected individual networks, so that the error occurred within a network will not propagate to the other one. The operation of different communication adapters (also called tiers) can also easily be integrated through the operation of the agent. The group communication provides the ability of error recovery when one of the components, either hardware or software, crashed. The integration of the operation of different adapters provides them the ability of being used in a complementary way, i.e., they can be used interchangeably, but transparent to the user, which in turn lets the building of a seamless roaming environment become easier. In the paper, the feature of SAGCoM, i.e., the concept, the operational model, the architecture, the fault tolerance, and the performance are discussed in detail. Finally, we conclude that the contribution of this paper is the SAGCoM itself, and the solutions that give the environment of SAGCoM those peculiar features.