Non-blocking transactional mobile agent execution

Abstract

Mobile agents are computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of a user and travel through a network of heterogeneous machines. To enable mobile agent technology for e-business, transaction support needs to be provided, in particular execution atomicity. Execution atomicity ensures that either all operations of the agent succeed, or none at all, and needs to be ensured also in the face of infrastructure failures. We distinguish between blocking and non-blocking solutions for transactional mobile agents, i.e., mobile agents, that execute as a transaction. The approach presented in the paper is non-blocking. A non-blocking transactional mobile agent execution has the important advantage, that it can make progress despite failures.