RT-JADE: A preemptive real-time scheduling middleware for mobile agents

Mobile agents are examples of distributed systems which may dispute for the same resources on their hosts. Treating such concurrency adequately is essential, particularly in real-time applications. Due to intrinsic time restrictions, mobile agents in real-time environments are only considered successful if they fulfill their mission by respecting their deadlines. Scheduling algorithms with different policies can be applied in these scenarios. However, the efficiency of these algorithms may deviate according to the missions and deadlines of the mobile agents. Also, these algorithms can be preemptive, or calculate the order of executions without interrupting an ongoing task. In this paper, we propose a middleware extension to the JADE platform that brings real-time scheduling support with preemption to mobile agents. The proposed solution uses best effort scheduling policy in the context of soft real-time applications. We evaluate the performance of the scheduling algorithms, with and without preemption, and the impact of the selected algorithms on mission fulfillment. The results of the proposed middleware showed a great improvement on mission accomplishment when compared to the FIFO algorithm provided by the JADE platform.