Using Dynamic Virtual Ports for the Recovery of Objects in an Agent-based Mobile Computing Environment

Sebnem Baydere, Gurhan Kucuk
Procedings of Int'l. Conference on Parallel and Distributed Applications and Techniques (PDPTA'98), Las Vegas, NA, June 1998, pp.747-753.

Abstract

There has been an interest to integrate existing data networks with facilities to support mobility of hosts. Through this integration it is aimed to increase the range of applications that can execute on mobile computers. One of the vital issues that need to be considered in mobile computing environments is the system recovery. There is a need to reinstate the system and applications following a voluntary shutdown. Voluntary shutdowns may be caused by battery run out, long-term network disconnection or something else. Without such a recovery facility applications that require access to network resources will have a very limited lifetime. Considering the requirements of mobility such as nonblocking network operations and queued requests, major concern is to establish the existing logical connections during recovery process at boot time. The approach presented in the paper enables recovery of the applications running on the mobile host when the system is shutdown properly. It is designed as a part of the MaROS system; an object system which, supports dynamic division of responsibilities between a mobile client and a fixed mobile service provider by enabling object relocation and disconnected operations. MaROS application developers may use the fixed server as their extended processing environment. Involuntary system crashes, which require additional methods such as global checkpointing, is not covered here. Agent-based MaROS framework has been presented somewhere else. In this paper, we present its communication infrastructure based on dynamic virtual port allocation and our approach to recovery of such systems.

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