GCS-MA: A group communication system for mobile agents

  • Authors:

  • Wei Xu;Jiannong Cao;Beihong Jin;Jing Li;Liang Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Technology Center of Software Engineering, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China and Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China;Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China;Technology Center of Software Engineering, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China;Technology Center of Software Engineering, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China;Technology Center of Software Engineering, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China and Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloo ...

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Network and Computer Applications
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Reliable messaging is a key component necessary for mobile agent systems. Current researches focus on reliable one-to-one message delivery to mobile agents. But how to implement a group communication system for mobile agents remains an open issue, which is a powerful block that facilitates the development of fault-tolerant mobile agent systems. In this paper, we propose a group communication system for mobile agents (GCS-MA), which includes totally ordered multicast and membership management functions. We divide a group of mobile agents into several agent clusters, and each agent cluster consists of all mobile agents residing in the same sub-network and is managed by a special module, named coordinator. Then, all coordinators form a ring-based overlay for interchanging messages between clusters. We present a token-based algorithm, an intra-cluster messaging algorithm and an inter-cluster migration algorithm to achieve atomicity and total ordering properties of multicast messages, by building a membership protocol on top of the clustering and failure detection mechanisms. Performance issues of the proposed system have been analysed through simulations. We also describe the application of the proposed system in the context of the service cooperation middleware (SCM) project.