AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH TO RELIABILITY ESTIMATION OF MOBILE AGENT-BASED SYSTEMS.

Reliability estimation of mobile agent-based systems remains a difficult task due to the characteristics of mobile agents that include distributed and asynchronous execution, autonomy, and mobility. In this paper we present an analytical approach to estimate the reliability of mobile agent-based systems. We define the reliability of a mobile agent in terms of the processor execution time required to perform agent's tasks at each processing node and the transmission or communication time needed to transfer the agent from one processing node to another via a network to complete its mission. The failure of entire components causes failure of the agent. Simulation experiments have been conducted using stochastic Petri Nets modeling. We investigate the effect of different component reliability and availability models (processors and links) on the system throughput. The results we have obtained demonstrate the impact of different reliability and availability models on the system throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]