Domain-based mobile agent fault-tolerance scheme for home network environments

Abstract

Mobile agent technology is very useful in home network environments and ubiquitous environments. For several reasons, a particular mobile agent may fail to operate during its movement between various platforms. For mobile agent recovery, a checkpoint can be used. However, devices in home network environments generally have minimal or no secondary storage. Therefore, a checkpoint cannot be saved on the device within a home network. In this paper, a scheme that safely recovers a mobile agent using a checkpoint saved within the home gateway is presented. When the mobile agent enters the single home network environment, it registers its recovery policy and saves its checkpoint on the home gateway. At the checkpoint saving instance, a symmetric key generated by the home gateway encrypts the checkpoint, this symmetric key is also encrypted and stored together with the checkpoint. When the mobile agent is abnormally terminated or the device suddenly turns off from battery exhaustion or failure, the home gateway recognizes the exception in the mobile agent or device, recovering the mobile agent with the checkpoint according to the previously registered recovery policy. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.