An Application-Transparent, Platform-Independent Approach to Rollback-Recovery for Mobile Agent Systems

This paper proposes a new approach to rollback-recovery for mobile-agent systems, and describes its implementation in the MESSENGERS mobile agents system. The used checkpointing method allows to implement space and time efficient, user-transparent rollback-recovery in heterogeneous distributed environments. Together with an efficient non-blocking system snapshot algorithm this checkpointing method is an attractive choice for implementing a rollback-recovery mechanism in the mobile agent system, because it exploits features specific to mobile agent systems during the recovery. This paper also presents an optimization technique, called concurrent checkpointing, that increases the effectiveness of the proposed rollback-recovery mechanism.