05 Fakultät Informatik, Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/6
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Item Open Access A protocol for preserving the exactly-once property of mobile agents(1997) Rothermel, Kurt; Straßer, MarkusMobile agents are autonomous objects that can migrate from node to node of a computer network. Mobile agent technology has been proposed for various application areas, including electronic commerce, systems management and active messaging. Many of these applications - especially those for electronic commerce - require agents to be performed 'exactly once', independent of communication and node failures. In other words, once a mobile agent has been launched, it must never be lost before its execution is finished. Moreover, each 'portion' of the agent performed at the visited nodes is performed exactly once. Due to the autonomy of mobile agents, there is no 'natural' instance that monitors the progress of an agent's execution. As a result of that agents may be blocked due to node crashes or network partitioning even if there are other nodes available that could continue processing. In this paper, we will describe a protocol that ensures the exactly once property of agents and additionally reduces the blocking probability of agents by introducing so-called observer nodes for monitoring the progress of agents. This protocol is based on conventional transactional technology, such as defined by X/Open DTP or CORBA OTS. It is implemented in the Mole, a mobile agent system developed at Stuttgart University.Item Open Access A context-aware hoarding mechanism for location-dependent information systems(2000) Kubach, Uwe; Rothermel, KurtWhen used in an outdoor environment mobile information systems often suffer from the disadvantages of wireless WANs, especially low bandwidth, high delay, and frequent disconnections. Hoarding is an effective method to overcome these disadvantages by transferring information which is probably needed by the user in advance. In this paper we propose a generic, context-aware hoarding mechanism. When selecting the information to hoard, it considers the user's future location as well as the expected speed of movement. In contrast to existing hoarding mechanisms it is universally applicable for different types of location-dependent, mobile information systems. Its flexibility allows it to rely on different knowledge sources in order to get information about a user's context.Item Open Access Application sharing in teaching context with wireless networks(2001) Burger, Cora; Papakosta, Stella; Rothermel, KurtThe success of teaching is depending on a couple of factors: on how far students are involved into lectures, on the material, its completeness and on co-learning of students. Involvement of students into lectures means, being able to follow the thoughts of the teacher, ask questions and make comments. The material must be presented in a suitable form and essential parts of it have to be available during the whole learning process, for preparing participation in lectures and exercises as well as for exams. For more effective learning and training of social abilities, working in groups of co-learners has to be encouraged. Mobile and ubiquitous computing offer new possibilities to achieve these goals by increasing the awareness in class and supporting an active participation of students. By promoting existing concepts and enabling new ways of application sharing, the project SASCIA (System architecture supporting cooperative and interactive applications) aims at developing a framework for multiple applications to support teaching in collocated, remote and hybrid scenarios. Its core is composed of components to capture and distribute context information about sessions, participants and those applications that are used during a lecture or encounter among students. A configurable floor control was designed to cope with a wide spectrum of applications and learning situations. For some cases, even a control for semantic consistency can be necessary. In combination with a suitable user and session management, a whiteboard for annotations and a recording facility to support latecomers as well as subsequent replay, these components are providing the required functionality. As a consequence, SASCIA offers remote control and viewing facilities to all participants during lectures and co-learning sessions.Item Open Access An agent based framework for the transparent distribution of computations(1999) Straßer, Markus; Baumann, Joachim; Schwehm, MarkusA mobile agent based framework for the transparent distribution and concurrent execution of computations is presented. The framework uses design patterns like the master-slave, abstract factory or the strategy pattern. The architecture of the framework is built on top of a mobile agent system. A performance model allows to identify performance bottlenecks and unbalanced situations within the framework. The framework has been implemented and tested on top of the mobile agent system Mole.Item Open Access ATOMAS : a transaction-oriented open multi agent system; final report(1998) Straßer, Markus; Baumann, Joachim; Hohl, Fritz; Schwehm, Markus; Rothermel, KurtThe electronic marketplace of the future will consist of a large number of services located on an open, distributed and heterogeneous platform, which will be used by an even larger number of clients. Mobile Agent Systems are considered to be a precondition for the evolution of such an electronic market. They can provide a flexible infrastructure for this market, i.e. for the installation of new services by service agents as well as for the utilization of these services by client agents. Mobile Agent Systems basically consist of a number of locations and agents. Locations are (logical) abstractions for (physical) hosts in a computer network. The network of locations serves as a unique and homogeneous platform, while the underlying network of hosts may be heterogeneous and widely distributed. Locations therefore have to guarantee independence from the underlying hard- and software. To make the Mobile Agent System an open platform, the system furthermore has to guarantee security of hosts against malicious attacks.Item Open Access Interaktion und Koordination in Multiagentensystemen(2001) Muscholl, Klaus Matthias; Levi, Paul (Prof. Dr.)Das Zusichern von kohärentem Verhalten in Multiagentensystemen ist durch die inhärente Verteiltheit des Systems, als auch durch den unabhängigen Entwurf der Agenten bei offenen Systemen, ein weithin ungelöstes Problem. In der vorliegenden Dissertation wird ein entwurfstechnischer Ansatz vorgestellt, welcher mit Hilfe von Interaktionsverfahren Kohärenz sicherstellt. Interaktionsverfahren werden dabei durch das Interaktionsmodell beschrieben. Die Grundidee besteht darin, daß Agenten durch die Teilnahme an einer Interaktion einen Teil ihrer Autonomie an das die Interaktion beschreibende Verfahren und seine Entscheidungsmechanismen abtreten und sich ihm unterordnen. Dies wird dadurch erzielt, daß ein Interaktionsverfahren die Koordination der an ihn übertragenen Kompetenzen übernimmt. Ein Interaktionsverfahren ist somit gegenüber den teilnehmenden Agenten weisungsbefugt. Um an Interaktionsverfahren teilnehmen zu können, muß ein Agent eine Schnittstelle unterstützen, welche es dem Interaktionsverfahren ermöglicht, auf die an ihn übertragen Kompetenz zuzugreifen und die kollektiv getroffenen Entscheidungen im einzelnen durchzusetzen. Hierzu sind unabhängig von Interaktionsverfahren für einen Anwendungsbereich Dienstklassen definiert, welche Schnittstellen zu Fähigkeiten eines Agenten bilden. Ein Interaktionsverfahren definiert das Ablaufschema einer Interaktion. Das Ablaufschema abstrahiert von Agenten in Form von Rollen. Das Schema ist in einzelne Phasen strukturiert und definiert, wie die Rollen untereinander interagieren. Rollen sind die kleinsten aktiven Einheiten des Interaktionsmodells und nur innerhalb einer Phase gültig. Agenten, welche an einem Interaktionsverfahren teilnehmen, werden durch Rollen gesteuert, die ihnen in den jeweiligen Phasen zugewiesen werden. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist Bestandteil des Architekturkonzepts von Robotersystemen im Comros-Projekt.Item Open Access Contributions to low energy consumption in digital circuits(2000) Bühler, Markus; Baitinger, Utz G. (Prof. Dr.-Ing)After bipolar, static PMOS, and NMOS technologies have been widely replaced by static CMOS, static current has practically disappeared in digital circuits. Thus, the problem of power consumption was thought to be solved. However, with increasing integration densities and operation frequencies, combined with the advent of complex portable devices, design for low power has regained its importance as the third design goal, beside delay and area consumption. But in contrast to the past, today, dynamic power consumption is dominant by far. The domain of low power design can be divided into two major subdomains: power estimation and actual circuit design for low power, the latter including all efforts for power optimization and low power synthesis. In this thesis, specific aspects of both subdomains are treated on different levels. The design aspect is covered by an investigation of suitable circuit techniques for a novel, 3D, T-gate, SOI technology. It was found that DPL fits best the structural requirements of this technology but consumes 50 more power than static CMOS. The consequences are discussed in the text. The main focus of this thesis is put on power estimation techniques on gate level. A novel, set based simulation method is presented and extended for real delay gate models (RDM). Several further optimization methods are proposed. It is shown that the RDM extension can also be applied to bitparallel logic simulators. As a last extension the set based approach is combined with probabilistic simulation methods, thus making it possible to take into account signal correlations during probabilistic estimation.Item Open Access Task allocation in distributed multimedia systems based on the host-satellite model(1998) Dermler, Gabriel; Iqbal, AshrafMultimedia applications require intermediate processing between media sources and sinks. In addition to end-user machines intermediate computers can be used for performing media processing. This possibility leads to the problem of allocating processing components on various computers. In this paper, we study this problem in the context of star-shaped application graphs which have to be allocated between given end-user machines (satellites) and a central computer (host). The problem is formulated in terms of best achievable bottleneck resource usage. Several approaches are considered including anapproximate scheme and two fast-heuristics. Performance measurements show the efficiency of the considered approaches. A discussion of our approach shows important differences to solutions provided for related problems of graph partitioning and mapping.Item Open Access System mechanisms for partial rollback of mobile agent execution(1999) Straßer, Markus; Rothermel, KurtMobile 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 in this paper. The rollback mechanism uses compensating operations to roll back the effects of the agent execution on the resources and uses a mixture of physical logging and compensating operations to rollback the state of the agent. The introduction of different types of compensating operations and the integration of an itinerary concept with the rollback mechanism allows performance improvements during the agent rollback as well as during the normal agent execution.Item Open Access A protocol for orphan detection and termination in mobile agent systems(1997) Baumann, JoachimOrphan detection and termination in distributed systems is a well researched field for which many solutions exist. These solutions exploit well defined parent-child relationships given in distributed systems. But they are not applicable in mobile agent systems, since no similar natural relationship between agents exist. Thus new protocols have to be developed. In this paper one such protocol for orphan detection and agent termination is presented. First we present two approaches, the energy concept and the path concept. The energy concept is a passive termination protocol, and the path concept is a protocol for finding agents, that can be used to implement active termination. The energy' approach is based on the idea that an agent is provided with a limited amount of energy, which can be spent in exchange for the resources used by the agent. From time to time the agent has to request additional energy from its creator. The agent is terminated as soon as the energy falls to 0. This approach to agent termination implicitly implements orphan detection, i.e. if the creator has terminated, the dependent agents are killed as soon as they have no energy left. The path' approach uses a chain of proxies. As soon as an agent leaves a location, a proxy is created that points to the new location. By following the chain of proxies, the path, one can find any agent, and consequently terminate it. Both approaches have disadvantages. By merging them on different levels we create a protocol that combines the advantages of both approaches, and at the same time minimizes the disadvantages. The shadow' approach uses the idea of a placeholder (shadow) which is assigned by the agent system to each new agent. The shadow records the location of all dependent agents. Removing the root shadow implies that all dependent shadows and agents are terminated recursively.