In the context of e-commerce, execution atomicity is an important property for mobile agents. A mobile agent executes atomically, if either all its operations succeed, or none at all. Assume, for instance, a mobile agent that books a flight and rents a hotel room at the destination. The hotel room is of no use if no flight is available. Consequently, either both operations need to succeed or none at all. Transactional mobile agents ensure execution atomicity on their entire execution. This requires to solve an instance of the atomic commitment problem. However, in the context of transactional mobile agent execution it is important that failures (e.g., of machines or agents) do not lead to blocking of the mobile agent execution. Blocking occurs, if the mobile agent execution cannot proceed because of a single failure. In this paper, we specify non-blocking atomic commitment in the context of mobile agent execution. We then show how transactional mobile agent execution can be built on top of earlier work on fault-tolerant mobile agent execution. Our implementation is the first implementation of non-blocking
transactional mobile agents. Its performance evaluation shows that the overhead introduced by the transaction mechanisms is reasonable.
A condensed version of this report under the title "Non-Blocking Transactional Mobile Agent Execution" has appeared in: Proceedings 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems "ICDSC 2002", Vienna, Austria, edited by. L.E.T. Rodrigues, M. Raynal, and W.-S.E. Chen, (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 2002), pp. 443-444.
By: Stefan Pleisch and Andre Schiper
Published in: RZ3386 in 2001
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