Design, Validation, Simulation and Parametric Evaluation of a Novel Protocol for Locating Mobile Agents in Multiregion Environment

Abstract

Mobile agents are processes that can be dispatched from source computer and be transported to remote servers for execution, have been widely argued to be an important enabling technology for future systems. Location management is a necessity for locating mobile agents in a network of mobile agent hosts for controlling, monitoring and communication during processing and it still represents an open research issue. The cost of location management strategies mainly depends on the cost of search and update. We concentrated on reducing the cost of update and improving the speed of processing of the agents. We proposed a location management technique applicable for multi-region environment in which mobile agent did not update its location at every migration. The technique named as Broadcasting with Search by Path Chase (BSPC). We used the tool time Petri net analyzer TINA to model, analyze and to simulate BSPC. We found that the BSPC behaves as expected and free from any deadlock. We measured the efficiency of BSPC and compared with some existing location management techniques by parametric evaluation. BSPC provided better scalability, location updating availability and interaction fault rate with theoretical considerations of network usage and network fault rate. It gave its best performance for applications of low CMR and having high migration rate of mobile agents within birth region.