Keywords m o b i l e agents, d i s t r i b u t e d directory service, fault tolerance A reliable c o m m u n i c a t i o n layer is an essential c o m p o n e n t of a mobile agent system. We present a new f a u l t -t o l e r a n t directory service for mobile agents, which c a n b e used to r o u t e messages to t h e m . T h e directory service, b a s e d on a terhn~que of forwarding pointers, introduces some r e d u nd a n c y in order t o ensure resilience to s t o p p i n g failures of nodes contaln~-g forwarding pointers; in addition, it avoids cyclic r o u t i n g of messages, a n d it s u p p o r t s a technique to collapse chains of pointers t h a t allows direct c o m m u n i c ations b e t w e e n agents. We have formalised t h e a l g o r i t h m a n d derived a ]uil~ mechanical proof of its correctness using t h e p r o o f assistant Coq; we r e p o r t on our experience of designLug t h e a l g o r i t h m a n d deriving its p r o o f of correctness. T h e c o m p l e t e source code of t h e p r o o f is m a d e aveglable f~om t h e W W W .
To consider failures of forwarders, a fault-tolerant directory service for mobile agents using redundancy of forwarding pointers REF was proposed.
A fault-tolerant directory service for mobile agents based on forwarding pointers
SAC '02
Computer Science