Comparative Analysis of Various Fault Tolerance Approaches in Mobile Agents System

Mobile Agent technology is emerging as a new paradigm in the area of distributed and mobile computing. Its paradigm has attracted many attentions but it is still not widely used. The reason for this is that it suffers from the various issues regarding reliable mechanisms like security and the fault tolerance in mobile agent system. Mobile agents have uniqueness that they can migrate from one server to another in order to satisfy requests made by their clients. Since mobile agent moves from one server to another in an itinerary it is easily prone to various faults like server crash or agent crash, which makes fault tolerance one of the main issues of reliability in mobile agent system. This paper surveys various fault tolerance techniques in mobile agent system proposed by various authors. These techniques are evaluated on the basis of defined parameters like type of fault, exactly once execution, agent centric, system centric, coordination and communication.