System mechanisms for partial rollback of mobile agent execution

Abstract

Mobile agent technology has been proposed for various fault-sensitive application areas, including electronic commerce, systems management and active messaging. Recently proposed protocols providing the exactly-once execution of mobile agents allow the usage of mobile agents in these application areas. Based on these protocols, a mechanism for the application-initiated partial rollback of the agent execution is presented. The rollback mechanism uses compensation operations to roll back the effects of the agent execution on the resources and uses a mixture of physical logging and compensation operations to roll back the state of the agent. The introduction of different types of compensation operations allows performance improvements during the agent rollback.