Achieving replication consistency using cooperating mobile agents

One problem in replication is coordinating the updates made to the copies maintained at different replicated servers so that data consistency is ensured. The paper presents a novel approach to designing protocols for accessing replicated data in a large-scale distributed environment such as the Internet. Unlike traditional message-passing based protocols which require expensive exchanges of messages among the replicated servers, the proposed approach uses cooperating mobile agents to synchronize the access to the replicated data at different servers. The design of such a mobile-agent enabled, fully-distributed protocol is presented and a prototypical implementation using IBM's Aglets is described. The performance of the protocol is also discussed.