FATOMAS-a fault-tolerant mobile agent system based on the agent-dependent approach

Fault tolerance is fundamental to the further development of mobile agent applications. In the context of mobile agents, fault-tolerance prevents a partial or complete loss of the agent, i.e., it ensures that the agent arrives at its destination. We present FATOMAS, a Java-based fault-tolerant mobile agent system based on an algorithm presented in an earlier paper (2000). Contrary to the standard "place-dependent" architectural approach, FATOMAS uses the novel "agent-dependent" approach. In this approach, the protocol that provides fault tolerance travels with the agent. This has the important advantage to allow fault-tolerant mobile agent execution without the need to modify the underlying mobile agent platform (in our case ObjectSpace's Voyager). In our performance evaluation, we show the costs of our approach relative to the single, non-replicated agent execution. Pipelined mode and optimized agent forwarding are two optimizations that reduce the overhead of a fault-tolerant mobile agent execution.