Fault-tolerance is fundamental to the further development of mobile agent applications. In the context of mobile agents, fault-tolerance prevents a partial or complete loss of the agent, i.e., ensures that the agent arrives at its destination. Simple approaches such as checkpointing are prone to blocking.
Replication can in principle improve solutions based on checkpointing.
This paper proposes a novel approach in fault- tolerant mobile agent execution, which is based on modeling agent execution as a sequence of agreement problems. Each agreement problem is one instance of the well-understood consensus problem. Our solution does not require a perfect failure detection mechanism, while preventing blocking and ensuring that the agent is executed exatly once.