Mobile Agent Based Fault-Tolerance Support for the Reliable Mobile Computing Systems

Abstract

To support the fault tolerance of mobile computing systems, many checkpointing coordination and message logging schemes have been proposed. However, due to the mobility of mobile hosts, coordination and control of these schemes are quite complicate and have the possibility of inefficiency. In this paper, a fault-tolerance scheme based on mobile agents is proposed. In the proposed scheme, a set of mobile and stationary agents are used to trace and maintain the recovery information for the mobile host. The mobile agents properly trace the mobile host and manage the suitable distance between the recovery information and the mobile host. Also, the migration of the recovery information of the mobile host can be performed asynchronously with the hand-off of the mobile host and hence the fault-tolerance service by mobile agents dose not incur any unnecessary hand-off delay.