Managing Fault Tolerance Information in Multi-agents Based Distributed Systems

Abstract

In a fault tolerant system using rollback-recovery protocols, the performance of the system is degraded because of the increment of saved fault tolerance information. To avoid degrading its performance, we propose novel multi-agents based garbage-collection technique that deletes useless fault tolerance information. We define and design a garbage-collection agent for garbage-collection of fault tolerance information, a information agent for management of fault tolerant information, and a facilitator agent for communication between agents. And we propose the garbage-collection algorithm(GCA) using these agents. Our rollback recovery method is based on independent checkpointing protocol and sender based pessimistic message logging protocol. To prove the correctness of the garbage-collection algorithm, we introduce failure injection during operation and compare the domain knowledge of the proposed system using GCA with the domain knowledge of another system without GCA.

This work was supported by grant No. R01-2001-000-00354-0 from the Korea Science & Engineering Foundation.