An approach for providing mobile agent fault tolerance

Abstract

This paper presents a fault-tolerance protocol for mobile agent executions that tolerates long-term failures of agencies. If the agency where an agent execution is being performed fails for a long-time, the execution can be recovered and continue at another agency. This is not only important for avoiding a mobile agent execution to become blocked, but it also contributes for enforcing the autonomy of organizations in an open environment emitting mobile agents to execute applications that cross the boundary of autonomous organizations. The protocol presented in this paper is based on mobile agent replication and is a variation of the protocol described in [6]. Our protocol differs from the work in [6] mainly in the sense that an agent can execute more than a single atomic transaction at an agency; it integrates distributed storage of recovery information; and it supports partial recovery of the activity carried out at an agency. The motivation of this work is on building a support for the execution of open nested transactions with a set of mobile agents.

The work of this author is partially supported by CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico), Brazil.