A scalable group communication mechanism for mobile agents

Abstract

Many multi-agent applications based on mobile agents require message propagation among group of agents. A fast and scalable group communication mechanism can considerably improve performance of these applications. Unfortunately, most of the existing approaches do not scale well and disseminate messages slowly when the number of agents grows. In this paper, we propose Sama, a new group communication mechanism, to speed up message delivery for a group of mobile agents on a heterogeneous internetwork. The main contribution of Sama is distribution and parallelization of message propagation in an efficient way to achieve scalability and high-speed of message delivery to group members. Sama uses message dispatcher objects (MDOs), which are stationary agents on each host, to propagate messages concurrently. The proposed mechanism is independent of agent locations and transparently delivers messages to the group using constant number of remote messages. It also transparently recovers from host failures. We also present a Hop-Ring protocol that considerably improves the performance of message dissemination in Sama. Our experimental results show that message propagation in Sama is significantly fast compared to the previously proposed methods.