Affiliation:
1. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
Abstract
Over the past years, mobile agent technology has attracted considerable attention, and a significant body of literature has been published. To further develop mobile agent technology, reliability mechanisms such as fault tolerance and transaction support are required. This article aims at structuring the field of fault-tolerant and transactional mobile agent execution and thus at guiding the reader to understand the basic strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches. It starts with a discussion on providing fault tolerance in a system in which processes simply fail. For this purpose, we first identify two basic requirements for fault-tolerant mobile agent execution: (1) non-blocking (i.e., a single failure does not prevent progress of the mobile agent execution) and (2) exactly-once (i.e., multiple executions of the agent are prevented). This leads us to introduce the notion of a <i>local transaction</i> as the basic building block for fault-tolerant mobile agent execution and to classify existing approaches according to when and by whom the local transactions are committed. In a second part, we show that transactional mobile agent execution additionally ensures execution atomicity and present a survey of existing approaches. In the last part of the survey, we extend the notion of fault tolerance to arbitrary Byzantine failures and security-related issues of the mobile agent execution.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
General Computer Science,Theoretical Computer Science
Cited by
22 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Applications of Intelligent Agents in Mobile Commerce;Mobile Commerce;2018
2. Applications of Intelligent Agents in Health Sector-A Review;International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications;2016-01
3. Application of Intelligent Agents in Mobile Shopping;Encyclopedia of E-Commerce Development, Implementation, and Management;2016
4. Applications of Intelligent Agents in Mobile Commerce;International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems;2014-10
5. Reliable mobile agents with transactional behaviour;International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems;2014