Ubiquitous devices united

Kjetil Jacobsen, Dag Johansen
1999 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM symposium on Applied computing - SAC '99  
The amount of computational resources available on the Internet is increasing. Effectively using these resources for distributed computations is challenging. An infrastructure called computational grids provides tools for structuring and deploying large-scale distributed computations on the Internet. One of the key problems in computational grids is managing the available computational resources; tools based on mobile agents are being advocated to solve this problem. However, to be widely
more » ... d, such tools must be robust towards failures in the grid environment, and thus require effective mechanisms for mobile agent fault-tolerance. To gain insight on how grid applications perform on the Internet, this dissertation investigates two master-worker algorithms, one based on group communication and one based on message flooding. Both algorithms are executed in simulations using Internet communication traces. The results from running and evaluating the algorithms are used to infer requirements for our mobile agent fault-tolerance approach. This dissertation then derives a fault-tolerant mobile agent protocol. The protocol is rooted in the primary-backup approach, where a set of backups monitor the progress of the mobile agent during the computation. The protocol allows the set of backups to be changed during the computation to adapt to the current network topology. The dissertation then describes an implementation of our protocol on top of a mobile agent platform, and evaluates the performance of the protocol. The results show that explicit management of backups can be beneficial to performance, and that our protocol is applicable outside the scope of mobile agent computations.
doi:10.1145/298151.298395 dblp:conf/sac/JacobsenJ99 fatcat:ljytvygpu5catd5p3mputsu4iy