Reliable Communication for Highly Mobile Agents

The provision of a reliable communication infrastructure for mobile agents is still an open research issue. The challenge to reliability does not come only from the possibility of faults, but is the presence of mobility itself that complicates the problem of ensuring the delivery of information. For instance, the asynchronous nature of message passing and agent migration may cause situations where the messages are chasing forever a mobile agent that moves frequently from one host to another. Current solutions to the problem 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. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that ensures guaranteed delivery to highly mobile agents using a mechanism similar to a distributed snapshot. A number of enhancements to this b..