Estimating Reliability of Mobile Agent System for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile agent is a particular type of agent with the ability to migrate from one host to another where it can resume its execution. Mobile agents can be used in applications for wireless network to save bandwidth and time. In this paper we consider dependability aspect, especially reliability issues that need to be addressed before the mobile agents can be used for a broad range of commercial applications in mobile adhoc network (MANET). The MANET introduces new aspects to dependability affecting reliability of the services of the mobile agent based system. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for estimating the task route reliability of mobile agent systems (MAS), which are based on the conditions of the underlying wireless network. The agents can select their route dynamically. The complexity of mobile agent network systems makes it hard to obtain the route reliability of the MAS theoretically; instead we estimate it using Monte Carlo simulation. In this paper, we assume that the MAS consist of a number of independent mobile agents operating simultaneously. The paper estimates the reliability of mobile agent system considering different failures of the underlying network. The results achieved demonstrate the robustness of the proposed algorithm. This paper demonstrates a reliability estimation model for MAS in MANET and shows that reliability is almost independent on the no. of agents (for higher no. of agents) or no. of mobile nodes but highly dependent on the condition of the links especially on the connectivity of the graph.