Fault Tolerance in Mobile Agents : State-of-the-Art and Challenges

Sammanfattning: The flexibility offered by mobile agents is quite noticeable in distributed computing environments. But the flexibility comes with a set of new levels of complexity due to their autonomous nature. The mobile agent paradigm introduce additional threats since agents systems are prone to failures originating from bad communication, security attacks, agent server crashes, system resources unavailability, network congestion or even deadlock situations. In such events, mobile agents either get lost or damaged (partially or totally) during execution. In order to gain solid foundation at the heart of today’s e-society, the mobile agent technology paradigm must address the issue of reliability. Making mobile agents fault tolerant is a measure taken to increase the dependability and reliability of agent-based application. Mobile agent’s fault tolerance is gaining momentum and many approaches have been proposed. Despite these efforts, the field still suffers from set backs in the form of persistent challenges. This study analyzes the existing fault tolerance approaches against a proposed generic fault tolerance framework that consists of a monitoring, planning and recovery process execution phases. Following the analysis, this study brings about the state-of-the-art in mobile agent’s fault tolerance approaches and the lingering challenges that affect mobile agent’s fault tolerance implementations from being efficiently and fully realized. The study will serve as a guide to future researches and possible solution for a more reliable and transparent fault tolerance in mobile agents.