A protocol for preserving the exactly-once property of mobile agents

Abstract

Mobile 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.