Providing Reliability for Transactional Mobile Agents

Abstract

A transactional agent is a mobile agent that migrates from a site to another one in order to execute a distributed transaction assigned by a user. Works on transactional mobile agents have identified two problems that can not be solved by the agent alone. The first one is related to the reliability. The lack of a fault tolerant infrastructure and methodologies that address fault tolerant execution of mobile agents highlights a major drawback of this technology. The second problem for which the agent needs assistance is related to the atomic validation of the transaction. In this paper we address the mobile agent fault tolerance and the transactional support.