Reliable directory service and message delivery for large-scale mobile agent systems

In this paper, we introduce a reliable directory service and message delivery mechanism for large-scale mobile agent systems to address both agent mobility and directory service node failures. The mechanism enables each mobile agent to keep its forwarding pointer only on the small number of its visiting nodes in an autonomous manner. As this desirable feature has every mobile agent's migration route be very considerably shortened, the time for forwarding each message to the agent becomes much smaller. Also, this feature causes each node to maintain much fewer forwarding pointers of mobile agents on its storage than in the traditional approach. Moreover, the mechanism allows each movement path of a mobile agent to be replicated in an effective way to preserve scalability of our proposed mechanism. This replication may require a little more agent location updating costs, but much more accelerate delivery of each message to the corresponding mobile agent.