Mobile Agent Group Communication Based On Mobile Group

Mobile agent is a new distributed computation technology and has a good application prospect. As an independently migrating distributed computing entity, mobile agent can alleviate network load, support disconnected computing, dynamically adapt to networking environments and so on. Therefore, mobile agent has been adopted in many application areas, such as mobile computing, cooperative computing and e-commerce. However, the mobility of mobile agent brings lots of problems in mobile agent communications. But current researches of mobile agent communications focus on one-to-one unicast protocols and lack practical solutions for mobile agent group communications. In this paper, we intend to study mobile agent group communications based on the concept of mobile group.First, this paper discusses the problems of mobile agent group communications. In the traditional distributed group communications, membership, management and reliable multicast are the most important aspects. Therefore, mobile agent group communication should contain these two aspects, but in the implement of them, the mobility of mobile agent must be considered. In this paper, we propose a mobile-group-based reliable mobile agent group communication system, called MGC-MA. MGC-MA mainly consists of a mobile group membership management protocol and a mobile group totally ordered reliable multicast protocol.In the mobile group membership management protocol, named MGMMP, we introduce a concept of group view. Group view represents the set of group members and indicates the locations where these members are, and we introduce some properties of group view in the paper. In mobile groups, all group members are required to install same group view. The protocol manages addition, leaving, migrations and crashes of mobile agents, which will create changes in group view. In order to make all group members get the same new group view after old group view changes, we propose a new consensus algorithm based on the logic ring structure which is improved on the consensus algorithm based on eventually strong failure detector.In this paper, the mobile group totally ordered reliable multicast protocol, named MGTOM, is also based on the logical ring structure. MGTOM achieves atomicity and total ordering properties of mobile group multicast communications. The atomicity property ensures that multicast messages could finally be delivered by all group members, and the total ordering property ensures that any pair of multicast messages could be delivered in same sequence by all group members. In multicast algorithm, in order to ensure the atomicity property, all group members which have received multicast messages should send replies, and in order to ensure the total ordering property, the group member who holds the token should...