A reliable mobile agent communication protocol

Abstract

We first propose a generic framework for the design of mobile agent communication protocols. The framework uses a flexible and adaptive mailbox-based scheme that associates each mobile agent with a mailbox while allowing the decoupling between them. This flexible approach allows us to design a variety of protocols which can be made adaptive to specific applications. Based on the framework, we derive a new protocol which possesses good characteristics such as efficiency and adaptability. To improve reliability, we implement the protocol with a fault tolerant architecture that consists of two levels of message passing primitives. Simulation results show that our protocol can effectively handle both network and host failures while keeping the communication cost low.