Fault Detection and Recovery in a Transactional Agent Model

Abstract

Servers can be fault-tolerant through replication and checkpointing technologies in the client server model. However, application programs cannot be performed and servers might block in the two-phase commitment protocol due to the client fault. In this paper, we discuss the transactional agent model to make application programs fault-tolerant by taking advantage of mobile agent technologies where a program can move from a computer to another computer in networks. Here, an application program on a faulty computer can be performed on another operational computer by moving the program. A transactional agent moves to computers where objects are locally manipulated. Objects manipulated have to be held until a transactional agent terminates. Some sibling computers which the transactional gent has visited might be faulty before the transactional agent terminates. The transactional agent has to detect faulty sibling computers and makes a decision on whether it commits/aborts or continues the computation by skipping the faulty computers depending on the commitment condition. For example, a transactional agent has to abort in the atomic commitment if a sibling computer is faulty. A transactional agent can just drop a faulty sibling computer in the at-least-one commitment. We evaluate the transactional agent model in terms of how long it takes for the transactional agent to treat faulty sibling computers .