The Shadow Approach: An Orphan Detection Protocol for Mobile
Agents
Baumann, Joachim; Rothermel, Kurt
- Abstract
- Orphan detection in distributed systems is a well researched field for which
many solutions exist. These solutions exploit well defined parent-child
relationships given in distributed systems. But they are not applicable in
mobile agent systems, since no similar natural relationship between agents
exist. Thus new protocols have to be developed. In this paper one such protocol
for controlling mobile mobile agents and for orphan detection is presented. The
`shadow' approach presented in this paper uses the idea of a placeholder
(shadow) which is assigned by the agent system to each new agent. This defines
an artificial relationship between agents and shadow. The shadow records the
location of all dependent agents. Removing the root shadow implies that all
dependent agents are declared orphan and are eventually terminated. We
introduce agent proxies that create a path from shadow to every agent. In an
extension of the basic protocol we additionally allow the shadow to be mobile.
The shadow approach can be used for termination of groups of agents even if the
exact location of each single agent is not known.
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