Fault-Tolerant Mobile Agent System Using eXtensible Volunteer Algorithm Enabled Dynamic Role-Based Access Control in a Conclave Environment

Mobile Agents have become one of the inevitable entities in applications where delegation and cooperation are required, especially in a distributed environment where computational tasks are achieved using a coordinated approach. In most applications, each mobile agent will be associated with a role and the role will be associated with functions. Mobile Agents gain access to resources based on the roles assigned to them. A distributed environment, nevertheless, to say, is a playfield for users with malicious intent. Hence, the mobile agents will be prone to various malicious attacks which in turn makes the mobile agents inoperational. This requires repetition of the creation and mobilisation process of mobile agents which creates a latency in processing the results. This can be avoided if a role managed by a mobile agent is delegated to another mobile agent within an execution environment. This work is specific to Conclave Environment which does not allow mobile agents to leave the platform until the designated task is completed. Adaptive mobile agents, a new class of mobile agents is designed and developed to get supplementary roles assigned to them and to perform additional tasks. The prime contribution of this work is the introduction of the eXtensible Volunteer Algorithm (XVA) which is instrumental in performing the assignment of roles and balancing the load due to supplementary role assignments. The result is the achievement of fault-tolerant systems in which mobile agents can conceive new roles subject to constraints defined within the environment. The experimental results also complement the argument that the deployment of XVA over adaptive mobile agents is efficient compared to that of most other fault-tolerant systems.