A New Approach for a Fault Tolerant Mobile Agent System

Improving the survivability of mobile agents in the presence of agent server failures with unreliable underlying networks is a challenging issue. In this paper, we address a fault tolerance approach of deploying cooperating agents to detect agent failures as well as to recover services in mobile agent systems. Three types of agents are involved, which are the actual agent, the supervisor agent and the replicas. We introduce a failure detection and recovery protocol by employing a message-passing mechanism among these three kinds of agents. Different failure scenarios and their corresponding recovery procedures are discussed. We choose Fatomas approach as a basic method. Message complexity of this approach is O (m2). Cooperative agents haven’t been considered in this approach. We are going to improve this message complexity in a system of cooperative agents.

Keywords:

mobile agent , fault tolerance , message-passing , checkpoint , rollback recovery