Coordinated Checkpointing Algorithms for Mobile Agent Environments

Abstract

Mobile agent execution environments have many features that are different from traditional distributed execution environments such as: mobility, autonomy and limited data size. If a failure occurs in an application where mobile agents cooperate and there is no appropriate method to protect it, more cost will be wasted for restarting the program. This investigation proposes checkpointing algorithms based on four mobile agent coordination models: direct coordination, blackboard-based coordination, meeting-oriented coordination and Linda-like coordination models. These algorithms consider the influence of spatial and temporal coupling on mobile agent coordination, and are easy to implement. Therefore, the checkpointing overhead can be reduced when mobile agents cooperate to complete a task in a multi-agent system. Finally, the experiments and our findings suggest the appropriate coordination algorithms for different applications.