Integrated Replication-Checkpoint Fault Tolerance Approach of mobile agents “IRCFT”

Suzanne Sweiti¹ and Amal Al Dweik²

¹Deanship of Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, Palestine Polytechnic University, Palestine

²College of Information Technology and Computer Engineering,

 Palestine Polytechnic University, Palestine

Abstract: Mobile agents offer flexibility which is evident in distributed computing environments. However, agent systems are subject to failures that result from bad communication, breakdown of agent server, security attacks, lack of system resources, congestion in network, and situations of deadlock. If any of such things happen, mobile agents suffer loss or damage totally or partially while execution is being carried out. Reliability must be addressed by the mobile agent technology paradigm. This paper introduces a novel fault tolerance approach “IRCFT” to detect agent failures as well as to recover services in mobile agent systems. Our approach makes use of checkpointing and replication where different agents cooperate to detect agent failures. We described the design of our approach, and different failure scenarios and their corresponding recovery procedures are discussed. The proposed system is implemented over Agelt platform. The system improves the performance significantly.

 Keywords: Mobile agents, fault tolerance, reliability, checkpointing, replication.

Received September 15, 2015; accepted October 18, 2015