The technique takes advantage of the redundancy existing in distributed systems not only to implement fault tolerance but also to minimize the computation cost induced by the fault tolerance requirement and to increase system performance. Fault tolerant features implemented by the APR technique are supported by the FTAG runtime system and are transparent to the application programmer. The group communication layer supports the group abstraction and provides services such as group membership and multicast services to the application layer. The group abstraction and the services provided by the GC Layer facilitates the implementation of parallel and distributed systems. They are active programs that perform computation on behalf of a user.
Mobile agents can migrate autonomously from node to node in a heterogeneous network.
Kluwer Academic Publishers, Chapter 22, January 1998. Contribution Member of the IEEE Society.