Transactional peer-to-peer information processing: The AMOR approach

Abstract

Mobile agent applications are a promising approach to cope with the ever increasing amount of data and services available in large networks. Users no longer have to manually browse for certain data or services but rather to submit a mobile personal agent that accesses and processes information on her/his behalf. These agents operate on top of a peer-to-peer network spanned by the individual providers of data and services. However, support for the correct concurrent and fault-tolerant execution of multiple agents accessing shared resources is vital to agent-based information processing. This paper addresses this problem and shows how agent-based information processing can be enriched by dedicated transactional semantics - despite of the lack of global control which is an inherent characteristic of peer-to-peer environments - by presenting the AMOR (Agents, MObility, and tRansactions) approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.