GMAC: An Overlay Multicast Network for Mobile Agents

GOTTHELF, P.; MENDOZA, M.; ZUNINO, A.; MATEOS, C.

Rosario

Simposio; VI Argentine Symposium on Computing Technology (AST2005), 34th JAIIO; 2005

SADIO

Mobile agents, software entities able to migrate autonomously their execution, provide many advantages over traditional models for distributed systems such as client/server or code on demand. Despite these advantages, mobile agent applications are not in widespread use, because most platforms for mobile agents rely on group communication services, among other factors. IP multicast was supposed to provide group communication services in an efficient and scalable way. Nevertheless, IP multicast has failed to deliver its promises mainly due to its difficult deployment. This work proposes GMAC, an overlay multicast network for mobile agents. In particular, we limited the scope of our research to MoviLog, a platform for mobile agents for the WWW, since the platform itself relies on multicast for managing mobility. GMAC provides multicast services in a decentralized and scalable way, where end systems implement all multicast related functionality including membership man- agement and packet forwarding. Simulations comparing GMAC with other approaches in aspects such as throughput, protocol overhead, resource uti- lization and group bandwidth show that GMAC is a robust solution for providing multicast services to MoviLog or appli- cations with similar requirements.