Evaluation of Fault-Tolerant Mobile Agents in Distributed Systems

Abstract

The secure execution of a mobile agent is a very important design issue in building a mobile agent system and many fault-tolerant schemes have been proposed so far. Mobile agents are no longer a theoretical issue since different architectures for their realization have been proposed .In the context of e-commerce, execution atomicity is an important property for mobile agents. A mobile agent executes atomically, if either all its operations succeed, or none at all. This requires to solve an instance of the atomic commitment problem. However, it is important that failures (e.g., of machines or agents) do not lead to blocking of transactional mobile agents, i.e., agents that execute as a transaction. In this paper, we give a novel specification of non-blocking atomic commitment in the context of mobile agent execution. Fault tolerance for mobile agent systems is an unsolved topic, to which more importance should be attached. Besides the security problems by intended attacks it is very important to realize that an agent can simply get lost by errors of the network or the hosts. We then show how transactional mobile agent execution can be built on top of earlier work on fault-tolerant mobile agent execution and give preliminary performance results