Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter VII
Modeling Fault Tolerant and
Secure Mobile Agent Execution
in Distributed Systems
H. Hamidi
Iran University of Science & Technology, Iran-Tehran
K. Mohammadi
Iran University of Science & Technology, Iran-Tehran
aBstract
The reliable execution of mobile agents is a very important design issue in building mobile agent sys-
tems and many fault-tolerant schemes have been proposed so far. Security is a major problem of mobile
agent systems, especially when monetary transactions are concerned. Security for the partners involved
is handled by encryption methods based on a public key authentication mechanism and by secret key
encryption of the communication. To achieve fault tolerance for the agent system, especially for the
agent transfer to a new host, we use distributed transaction processing. We propose a fault-tolerant
approach for mobile agents design which offers a user transparent fault tolerance that can be activated
on request, according to the needs of the task. We also discuss how transactional agents with different
types of commitment constraints can commit transactions. Furthermore, we present a solution for ef-
fective agent deployment using dynamic agent domains.
introduction
A mobile agent is a software program which migrates from a site to another site to perform tasks as-
signed by a user. For the mobile agent system to support agents in various application areas, the issues
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