Failure semantics of mobile agent systems involved in network fault management

Recently mobile agent technology has been recognised as a potential tool for realising distributed network fault management. The autonomy and mobility of such agents can help ensuring robustness of the management system. A mobile agent is dependent on a suitable environment consisting of a set of mobile agent systems (MAS) of compatible system types. In this paper we examine what failure semantics are desirable for services provided by a MAS when assuming the MAS to be part of a network fault management system. Based on a general failure class model we define a new failure subclass. The subclass identifies the usefulness of certain response failure semantics in MAS-based systems in contrast to traditional client-server systems. At the end of the paper results from an evaluation project examining state of the art MASes are presented.