Towards an adaptive middleware for opportunistic environment

Abstract

The mobile agent paradigm has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome the construction challenges of opportunistic grid environments. This model can be used to implement mechanisms that enable application execution progress even in the presence of failures, such as those presented by the MAG middleware (Mobile Agents for Grids). MAG includes retrying, replication, and checkpointing as fault-tolerance techniques; they operate independently from each other and are not capable of detecting changes on resource availability. In this paper, we describe a MAG extension that is capable of migrating agents when nodes fail, that optimizes application progress by keeping only the most advanced checkpoint, and that migrates slow replicas.