Fault Tolerance Mechanism in Secure Mobile Agent Platform System

The mobile agent paradigm has attracted many attentions recently but it is still not widely used. One of the barriers is the difficulty in protecting an agent from failure because an agent is able to migrate over the network autonomously. Design and implementation of mechanisms to relocate computations requires a careful consideration of fault tolerance, especially on open networks like the Internet. . In the context of mobile agents, fault-tolerance prevents a partial or complete loss of the agent, i.e., ensures that the agent arrives at its destination. In this paper, we propose fault tolerant mechanism based on replication and voting for mobile agent platform system. The proposed mechanism has been implemented and evaluated the effects of varying of degree, different replication methods and voting frequencies on Secure Mobile Agent Platform System (SMAPS). We also report on the result of reliability and performance issue involved in mobile agent for Internet application.