Mobile agent group communication protocol ensuring causal order semantics

Abstract

Mobile agent group concept is a versatile software paradigm capable of providing group task execution flexibility and collaborative adaptability in various application fields of distributed networked systems. However, as the size of these fields is rapidly increasing, improving the performance of the agent group communication in Internet-scale infrastructures should be reconsidered to be suitable for their scale. For this purpose, some appropriate inter-agent group communication protocols are required in distributed agent-based systems. Causal order delivery to a broadcast group is a very important issue for these systems. However, the existing message delivery protocols for mobile agent groups may not satisfy this important requirement. This paper presents a new causally ordered group communication protocol for mobile agent groups to consider weaker message ordering consistency than atomic broadcast semantics while ensuring reliability even with the assumption of unreliable networks for exchanging messages to agent groups and agent mobility. The simulation results show the proposed protocol performs better than the existing atomic broadcast protocol in terms of the total message delivery latency.