Improved checkpoint mechanism in mobile agent systems for information retrieval applications

Growth of network domains and mobile agent technology has been an emerging trend in the recent era of distributed computing. The mobile agent paradigm is advantageous due to low bandwidth in distributed systems. But it has to undergo certain problems and challenges, in order to meet bandwidth requirements. Moreover, certain issues related to fault tolerance and security may arise in the migration of mobile agents. In the proposed approach we present fault tolerance for mobile agent based systems. The novelty of this approach is updating the home server about the information of the system. This approach makes use of clone of the original agent for the updating home server. Checkpoints are used periodically after fixed number of servers for the updating of the retrieved results. Experiments evaluated show that the round trip time of the proposed approach is less than the earlier approaches and comparison of time is done for checkpoints after different number of servers and it shows that the more are the number of servers after which checkpointing is done, lesser is the round trip time for the retrieval of information. Hence, this approach concerns not only with reliability due to some extended features but also assures a robust fault tolerance mechanism by reducing overheads.