A Systematic Review of Fault Tolerance in Mobile Agents

Abstract

Mobile agents have engrossed substantial attention in recent years, especially in fault tolerance researches and several approaches have emerged. Fault tolerance design tends to put a stop to incomplete or complete loss of the agent in the face of failures. Despite these developments, reliability issues still remain a critical challenge. Moreover, there is no comprehensive detail bringing together, summaries of the existing efforts of researches in order to focus attention where it is needed most. Therefore, our objective in this systematic literature review (SR) is to explore and analyze the existing fault tolerance implementations in order to bring about the state-of-the-art and the challenges in mobile agent's fault tolerance approaches. We used studies from a number of relevant article sources, and our results showed the existence of twenty six articles. Our analysis indicates that the existing approaches are not generic and each focuses on a specific aspect of the problem, usually in one or two specific fault models which impacts on agent's reliability. The implication of the study is to give a clear direction to future researchers in this area for a better reliable and transparent fault tolerance in mobile agents.