Reliable Communication for Highly Mobile Agents

摘要

The provision of a reliable communication infrastructure for mobile agents is still an open research issue. The challenge to reliability we address in this work does not come from the possibility of faults, but rather from the mere presence of mobility, which complicates the problem of ensuring the delivery of information even in a fault-free network. For instance, the asynchronous nature of message passing and agent migration may cause situations where messages forever chase a mobile agent that moves frequently from one host to another. Current solutions rely on conventional technologies that either do not provide a solution for the aforementioned problem, because they were not designed with mobility in mind, or enforce continuous connectivity with the message source, which in many cases defeats the very purpose of using mobile agents.