CIC: an integrated approach to checkpointing in mobile agent systems

As a widely used fault tolerance technique, checkpointing has evolved into several schemes: independent, coordinated, and communication-induced (CIC). Independent and coordinated checkpointing have been adopted in many works on fault tolerant mobile agent (MA) systems. However, CIC, a flexible, efficient, and scalable checkpointing scheme, has not been applied to MA systems. Based on the analysis of the behavior of mobile agent, we argue that CIC is a well suited checkpointing scheme for MA systems. CIC not only establishes the consistent recovery lines efficiently but also integrates well with the independent checkpointing for reliable MA migration. Here, we propose an important improvement to CIC, referred to as the deferred message processing based CIC algorithm (DM-CIC), which achieves higher efficiency by exempting the CIC algorithm from making the forced checkpoints in MA systems. Through simulation, we find out that DM-CIC is stable and better suited to large scale MA systems.