The mobile groups approach for the coordination of mobile agents

Abstract

We present the concept of mobile groups as a basic mechanism for the reliable coordination of mobile agents. Analogously to traditional group systems, mobile groups also provide message delivery guarantees and virtual synchrony. Furthermore, they make agent mobility not only visible for the group, but also consistently orderedwith other group actions (such as crashes, joins, leaves, andother migrations). The mobile groups approach represents a novel mobility support mechanism, which can be usedto handle reliability of mobile agents required at both, the application andsystem level (e.g., for coordinating distributedagents andfor reliable agent migration, respectively). In this paper, we discuss the motivations for the mobile groups approach, formally define their properties, and present a membership protocol for such groups. We also discuss some implementation issues andrelatedperformance data, andpresent the advantages of mobile groups against mechanisms commonly employedfor the coordination of mobile agents.