A Generic Framework For Mobile Agent Communication And Fault Tolerant Mechanism

Mobile agents used in various applications need to communicate with each other for different purposes such as exchanging information or co-operation. Reliable agent communication mechanism should guarantee the exact delivery of messages. Besides, the agent migration and message delivery algorithm should not introduce too much overhead. Although there are several protocols trying to provide reliable inter-agent communication and location transparency, they reduce the mobility and independence of the mobile agent.In recent years, communication mechanism based on mailbox has become a research direction, which is quite flexible and supports asynchronous operations of message delivery and migration of the mobile Agent to improve its mobility and independence. What's more, in the mechanism migration frequency of mailbox is much less than that of Agent,so message-tracking seldom occurs and reliability of communication is enhanced. Now research on the mailbox mechanism just starts. Mailbox mechanisms in existence have such common faults as limited application fields, less flexibility and lack of commonality for a framework. It needs to be solved how to design a generic framework.This paper presents a generic framework for designing the communication protocols of mobile Agent. The framework uses flexible and adaptive mailbox-based scheme, which not only covers several known protocols, but also supports for design of new ones. Using this network, users can find satisfactory protocols with combination of three-dimension parameters according to application requirements. Each protocol is adaptable in the changes of the network environment and switches with each other flexibly. The generic framework has more application fields, more flexible and general mechanism than before.To enhance reliability, this paper further proposes a fault tolerant framework which consists of two-level communication primitives. The low-level primitives abstract away network failures, and provide reliable point-to-point message passing between two MAPs. The high-level primitives overcome message loss and faults due to host failures, and accomplish reliable ordered end-to-end message delivery between two mobile agents.This paper chooses NS2 as experimental platform. The simulation experiments...