The Cost of Checkpointing Recovery for the Mobile Agent Systems

The reliable execution of a mobile agent is a very important design issue to build a mobile agent system and many fault-tolerant schemes have been proposed. However, there is very little research results on the performance evaluation of those schemes. Hence, in this paper, we present the experimental evaluation of the performance of the fault-tolerant schemes for the mobile agent environment. Our evaluation focuses on the checkpointing schemes and deals with the cooperating agents. Some of the well-known checkpoint coordination and logging schemes are implemented on the mobile agent environment and the performances of the schemes are measured. The experiments are especially designed to analyze how the characteristics of an agent and the system influence on the performance of the checkpoint coordination and the logging schemes, in detail. From the experimental results, the system environment suitable for each of the fault-tolerant schemes is discussed and the stability of the schemes is also discussed.