Optimistic Replication Approach for Transactional Mobile Agent Fault Tolerance

Abstract

The mobile agent is a computer program that can move between different hosts in heterogeneous networks. This paradigm is advantageous for distributed systems implementation, especially in mobile computing application characterized by low bandwidth, high latency and unreliable networks connections. Mobile agent is also attractive for distributed transactions applications. Although mobile agent has been studied for twenty years for some good reasons, it is not largely used in developing distributed systems for simple reasons: important issues like security and fault tolerance are not solved in effective way. In this paper we address the issue of fault tolerance in mobile agent systems and transactional support. We present the agent system design and describe the protocol of our approach in which we treat infrastructure failures to prevent a partial or complete loss of mobile agent and deal with semantic failures to ensure atomic execution and transactional support for mobile agent.