Mobile Agent Reliable Group Communication Research

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. Mobile agent group communication is divided into agent information correctly arriving at each other mobile agent group and the message is reliably delivered in the group after arriving. In this paper, we intend to study mobile agent group communications based on the concept of mobile group.This paper first discusses the mobile agent group communication problem. In traditional distributed group communication, the process is static, but in the mobile agent group communication, the process is mobile process which is dynamic. Therefore, mobile agent group brings out four problems: 1,name for mobile agent;2,locating for mobile agent;3,message handling for mobile agent group;4,cooperaing during the mobile agent group. The one needed to be cared is that message handling for mobile agent group includes the message being delivered in mobile agent group and the message being received between mobile agent groups.Naming service is used to resolve the identity of agent. Domain name resolver providers all the agents in this domain for registry service, such as logon, logout, query and so on. Communication service component provides for the communication service between mobile agents, the detail of its realization will be expounded in the method of mobile agent group communication.Reliable communication in mobile agent group based on ARC adopts MailBox structure which is in adaptive and reliable message deliver mechanism based on MailBox to be the interim message station and message buffer, in order to resolve message handling in mobile agent group. If token holder takes the message from the mailbox and delibers it to the special agent in the group, the mailbox acts as the message buffer. If token holder takes the message from the mailbox and multicast in the group, the mailbox acts as the message station. Reliable communications in mobile agent group based on ARC realiszes reliable message deliver in mobile agent group.The method of communication between mobile agent groups based on sendbox adopts the data structure of sendbox which is used to store the data if agent can't send message to another agent as the current migration or agent can't send message to another mobile agent group's interim message station as the network failure. The method of communication between mobile agent groups based on sandbox ensures the reliable communication between mobile agent groups.At the end of this paper, we make the experiment on IBM aglet mobile agent platform, evaluating the performance analyse on the method of Reliable communication in mobile agent group based on ARC and The method of communication between mobile agent groups based on sandbox. The performance analyse focuses on the communication speed and reliability.