移动Agent通信可靠性研究

提出基于Sama的移动Agent可靠通信方法来进行移动Agent通信,采用一种容错机制,使信息可靠传输.该通信方法旨在帮助提高在组内互相发送相同信息的情况下移动Agent通信的可靠性.     

一种改进的移动Agent通信算法

如何实现远程Agent通信的位置透明性，保证消息不会因为目标Agent迁移而丢失，一直是移动Agent通信所面临的难题，在现有的很多移动Agent系统中都没有得到解决，作者在Mogent系统中提出的通信算法初步实现了通信的位置透明和可靠的消息传输，该文在原有处的基础上提出了一种改进的适于多种迁移和通信模式的移动Agent通信算法，进一步减少了Agent的地址注册开销和迁移受到的限制，并给出了一种避免地址欺骗攻击的解决方案。     

Reliable Communication for Highly Mobile Agents

The provision of a reliable communication infrastructure for mobile agents is still an open research issue. The challenge to reliability we address in this work does not come from the possibility of faults, but rather from the mere presence of mobility, which complicates the problem of ensuring the delivery of information even in a fault-free network. For instance, the asynchronous nature of message passing and agent migration may cause situations where messages forever chase a mobile agent that moves frequently from one host to another. Current solutions rely on conventional technologies that either do not provide a solution for the aforementioned problem, because they were not designed with mobility in mind, or enforce continuous connectivity with the message source, which in many cases defeats the very purpose of using mobile agents.In this paper, we propose an algorithm that guarantees delivery to highly mobile agents using a technique similar to a distributed snapshot. A number of enhancements to this basic idea are discussed, which limit the scope of message delivery by allowing dynamic creation of the connectivity graph. Notably, the very structure of our algorithm makes it amenable not only to guarantee message delivery to a specific mobile agent, but also to provide multicast communication to a group of agents, which constitutes another open problem in research on mobile agents. After presenting our algorithm and its properties, we discuss its implementability by analyzing the requirements on the underlying mobile agent platform, and argue about its applicability.     

A reliable multicast protocol for distributed mobile systems:design and evaluation

Reliable multicast is a powerful communication primitive for structuring distributed programs in which multiple processes must closely cooperate together. We propose a protocol for supporting reliable multicast in a distributed system that includes mobile hosts and evaluate the performance of our proposal through simulation We consider a scenario in which mobile hosts communicate with a wired infrastructure by means of wireless technology. Our proposal provides several novel features. The sender of each multicast may select among three increasingly strong delivery ordering guarantees: FIFO, causal, total. Movements do not trigger the transmission of any message in the wired network as no notion of hand-off is used. The set of senders and receivers (group) may be dynamic. The size of data structures at mobile hosts, the size of message headers, and the number of messages in the wired network for each multicast are all independent of the number of group members. The wireless network is assumed to provide only incomplete spatial coverage and message losses could occur even within cells. Movements are not negotiated and a mobile host that leaves a cell may enter any other cell, perhaps after a potentially long disconnection. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol has good performance and good scalability properties     

GCS-MA: A group communication system for mobile agents

Reliable messaging is a key component necessary for mobile agent systems. Current researches focus on reliable one-to-one message delivery to mobile agents. But how to implement a group communication system for mobile agents remains an open issue, which is a powerful block that facilitates the development of fault-tolerant mobile agent systems. In this paper, we propose a group communication system for mobile agents (GCS-MA), which includes totally ordered multicast and membership management functions. We divide a group of mobile agents into several agent clusters, and each agent cluster consists of all mobile agents residing in the same sub-network and is managed by a special module, named coordinator. Then, all coordinators form a ring-based overlay for interchanging messages between clusters. We present a token-based algorithm, an intra-cluster messaging algorithm and an inter-cluster migration algorithm to achieve atomicity and total ordering properties of multicast messages, by building a membership protocol on top of the clustering and failure detection mechanisms. Performance issues of the proposed system have been analysed through simulations. We also describe the application of the proposed system in the context of the service cooperation middleware (SCM) project.     

Mailbox-based scheme for mobile agent communications

In various situations, mobile agents at different hosts must cooperate with one another by sharing information and making decisions collectively. To ensure effective interagent communication, communication protocols must track target agent locations and deliver messages reliably. Researchers have proposed a wide range of schemes for agent tracking and reliable message delivery. However, each scheme has its own assumptions, design goals, and methodology. As a result, no uniform or structured methods exist for characterizing current protocols, making it difficult to evaluate their relative effectiveness and performance. The authors propose a mailbox-based scheme for designing mobile agent communication protocols. This scheme assigns each agent a mailbox to buffer messages, but decouples the agent and mailbox to let them reside at different hosts and migrate separately.     

一种面向移动计算的低代价透明检查点恢复协议

移动计算系统中的检查点恢复协议面临着许多与传统分布式系统所不同的问题.在目前已出现的支持移动计算的检查点恢复机制中,基于建立全局一致的检查点的方法不能确保错误的独立恢复;基于m-MSS-m通信的消息日志方法其移动站之间交换的消息需通过移动基站的转发.提出了一种基于消息日志的支持移动站之间直接通信(m-m)的容错协议并给出了相应的算法及正确性证明.与m-MSS-m通信相比,m-m通信有利于降低信道冲突;减少消息传递延迟.仿真结果表明,所设计的协议比传统协议具有更小的无错误状态下引入负载和错误恢复时间.     

一种新的移动Agent间通信算法

在分析已有广播通信机制的基础上,提出了一种新的移动Agent间通信算法。通过可靠扩散来实现广播,保证接收者至少接收一次消息;通过接收者主动请求消息,保证接收者只能接收一次消息。新算法保证可靠地完成消息发送以及消息传递的exactly—once语义,并在效率上有了进一步的提高。除了基本的算法,还讨论了一些改进的算法以及实现中遇到的一些问题。     

基于信息表的移动Agent通信机制

通信是移动Agent必不可少的组成部分.许多研究者针对这一问题进行了深入的研究,并提出了一些移动Agent的通信机制,但是现有的这些通信机制在解决通信失效和消息追逐上都存在着一定的不足.针对这些问题,通过将信息表引入移动Agent的通信机制中,提出一种基于信息表的移动Agent通信机制.在这种通信机制中,把移动Agent要接收的消息按照其特性分为主动消息和被动消息,利用动态改变路标中信息表参数的方法来解决移动Agent之间通信所面临的难题.     

Using optimistic atomic broadcast in transaction processing systems

Atomic broadcast primitives are often proposed as a mechanism to allow fault-tolerant cooperation between sites in a distributed system. Unfortunately, the delay incurred before a message can be delivered makes it difficult to implement high performance, scalable applications on top of atomic broadcast primitives. Recently, a new approach has been proposed for atomic broadcast which, based on optimistic assumptions about the communication system, reduces the average delay for message delivery to the application. We develop this idea further and show how applications can take even more advantage of the optimistic assumption by overlapping the coordination phase of the atomic broadcast algorithm with the processing of delivered messages. In particular, we present a replicated database architecture that employs the new atomic broadcast primitive in such a way that communication and transaction processing are fully overlapped, providing high performance without relaxing transaction correctness.     

Multicast communication in multicomputer networks

Efficient routing of messages is a key to the performance of multicomputers. Multicast communication refers to the delivery of the same message from a source node to an arbitrary number of destination nodes. While multicast communication is highly demanded in many applications, most of the existing multicomputers do not directly support this service; rather it is indirectly supported by multiple one-to-one or broadcast communications, which result in more network traffic and a waste of system resources. The authors study routing evaluation criteria for multicast communication under different switching technologies. Multicast communication in multicomputers is formulated as a graph theoretical problem. Depending on the evaluation criteria and switching technologies, they study three optimal multicast communication problems, which are equivalent to the finding of the following three subgraphs: optimal multicast path, optimal multicast cycle, and minimal Steiner tree, where the interconnection of a multicomputer defines a host graph. They show that all these optimization problems are NP-complete for the popular 2D-mesh and hypercube host graphs. Heuristic multicast algorithms for these routing problems are proposed     

基于注意力消息共享的多智能体强化学习

通信是非全知环境中多智能体间实现有效合作的重要途径,当智能体数量较多时,通信过程会产生冗余消息。为有效处理通信消息,提出一种基于注意力消息共享的多智能体强化学习算法AMSAC。首先,在智能体间搭建用于有效沟通的消息共享网络,智能体通过消息读取和写入完成信息共享,解决智能体在非全知、任务复杂场景下缺乏沟通的问题;其次,在消息共享网络中,通过注意力消息共享机制对通信消息进行自适应处理,有侧重地处理来自不同智能体的消息,解决较大规模多智能体系统在通信过程中无法有效识别消息并利用的问题;然后,在集中式Critic网络中,使用Native Critic依据时序差分（TD）优势策略梯度更新Actor网络参数,使智能体的动作价值得到有效评判;最后,在执行期间,智能体分布式Actor网络根据自身观测和消息共享网络的信息进行决策。在星际争霸Ⅱ多智能体挑战赛（SMAC）环境中进行实验,结果表明,与朴素Actor?Critic （Native AC）、博弈抽象通信（GA?Comm）等多智能体强化学习方法相比,AMSAC在四个不同场景下的平均胜率提升了4 ~ 32个百分点。AMSAC的注意力消息共享机制为处理多智能体系统中智能体间的通信消息提供了合理方案,在交通枢纽控制和无人机协同领域都具备广泛的应用前景。     

Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Multicast in Hypercube Multicomputers

Fault-tolerant message routing mechanism is a key to the performance of reliable multicomputers. Multicast refers to the delivery of the same message from a source node to an arbitrary number of destination nodes. This paper presents two types of partially adaptive fault tolerant multicast algorithms. The Type A algorithm can deliver messages to all destinations through shortest paths if each fault-free node has at most one faulty neighbor. The Type B algorithm can deliver messages to all destinations if the total number of faulty links and faulty nodes is less than the dimension of the hypercube. The proposed algorithms have the following important features: they are distributed, they only require local information to determine the paths, and they need very little additional message overhead. The performance of the algorithms, measured by the traffic created by the communication, is very close to that in fault-free hypercubes.     

一种间歇性连接移动网络自适应路由协议

为提高间歇性连接移动网络的消息发送效率,提出一种基于移动自组网OLSR协议的自适应路由协议ARPBO。ARPBO在网络连通时通过OLSR协议快速转发消息;在网络中断时对OLSR协议进行扩展,从消息发送节点的局部连通网络中有效选择下一跳节点,然后通过延迟容忍网络的"存储-携带-转发"机制转发消息。实验结果表明,该路由协议能够在网络存在间歇性连接时获得较高的传递成功率和较低的传递时延。     

Efficient communication using message prediction for clusters of multiprocessors

With the increasing uniprocessor and symmetric multiprocessor computational power available today, interprocessor communication has become an important factor that limits the performance of clusters of workstations/multiprocessors. Many factors including communication hardware overhead, communication software overhead, and the user environment overhead (multithreading, multiuser) affect the performance of the communication subsystems in such systems. A significant portion of the software communication overhead belongs to a number of message copying operations. Ideally, it is desirable to have a true zero‐copy protocol where the message is moved directly from the send buffer in its user space to the receive buffer in the destination without any intermediate buffering. However, due to the fact that message‐passing applications at the send side do not know the final receive buffer addresses, early arrival messages have to be buffered at a temporary area. In this paper, we show that there is a message reception communication locality in message‐passing applications. We have utilized this communication locality and devised different message predictors at the receiver sides of communications. In essence, these message predictors can be efficiently used to drain the network and cache the incoming messages even if the corresponding receive calls have not yet been posted. The performance of these predictors, in terms of hit ratio, on some parallel applications are quite promising and suggest that prediction has the potential to eliminate most of the remaining message copies. We also show that the proposed predictors do not have sensitivity to the starting message reception call, and that they perform better than (or at least equal to) our previously proposed predictors. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Total ordering group communication protocol based on coordinating sequencers for multiple overlapping groups

This paper presents a total ordering protocol for group communication systems with multiple overlapping groups. Our protocol takes advantages of the simplicity of the sequencer-based approach, but employs multiple sequencers to achieve better load balance. For a given message, the sequencer of the destination group constructs a sequencing array by requesting for relative delivery positions from the sequencers of the overlapping groups. The sequencing array is used by any receiving process to determine the delivery sequence of the message. The notion of logical clock is used for determining the relative delivery sequences of the messages. The coordination between the sequencers is performed in a simple, asynchronous and non-blocking manner. The delivery operation at a receiving process is very simple, and a message can be delivered as soon as it becomes deliverable. These factors amount to a significant saving of the computing and communication overhead for the system. As the protocol demands the minimum effort from the group members it is suitable for mobile computing environment in which mobile devices are typically tight on resources. In the paper, we also present some ways to enhance the performance of the system. Extension of the protocol to encompass the preservation of causality, the dynamic group membership and the failure recovery is included in the paper.     

Exploiting skewed access and energy-efficient algorithm to improve the performance of wireless data broadcasting

As wireless networks become an integral component of the current communication infrastructure, energy efficiency is a crucial design consideration because of the limited battery life of mobile terminals. Data broadcast is an effective data dissemination method in mobile environments. The current air indexing schemes for data broadcast focused on energy efficiency (reducing tuning time) only, and current broadcast scheduling schemes reduce access latency through nonflat data broadcast to improve only responsiveness. Few studies have addressed energy efficiency and responsiveness issues concurrently. This study proposes a fast data access scheme that concurrently supports the energy saving protocol, which constructs broadcast channels according to the access frequency of each type of message to improve energy efficiency in mobile devices. The windmill scheduling algorithm that is presented in this paper was used to organize all types of messages in the broadcast channel in the most symmetrical distribution, to reduce tuning and access time. The performance of the proposed mechanism was analyzed, and the efficiency improvement over existing methods was demonstrated numerically. Results indicate that the proposed mechanism is capable of improving both tuning and access time because of the presence of skewness in the access distribution among disseminated messages.     

An Efficient Authentication Scheme for Access Control in Mobile Pay-TV Systems

In a mobile pay-TV system, a large number of messages are exchanged for mutual authentication purposes. In traditional authentication schemes, with one-to-one delivery, one authentication message per request is delivered from a head end system to subscribers. This results in the delivery of a large quantity of messages and therefore is inefficient and costly. Moreover, since most traditional schemes use an RSA-based signature for identity validation and nonrepudiation of communication, they suffer from high communication costs. Due to its wireless nature, mobile pay-TV is vulnerable to attacks during hand-off. As traditional schemes do not support hand-off authentication, they are insecure during hand-off. With these shortcomings, they are not suitable for mobile pay-TV. In this paper, we propose an innovative authentication scheme, in which, by providing one-to-many facility, only one authentication message for multiple requests is broadcasted from the head end system to subscribers. By employing bilinear property of pairing and elliptic curve cryptography, our scheme provides one-to-many facility in the case of multiple requests for the same service in a short period of time. This new scheme achieves better broadcast efficiency and performance on communication costs than traditional ones. Additionally, this scheme provides a hand-off authentication mechanism to protect the access of services while preventing attacks during hand-off; therefore, the scheme is more secure to support access control. Moreover, to provide anonymous authentication for protecting identity privacy, the scheme adopts an identity-based scheme while traditional schemes do not apply. The scheme inherits advantages of the identity-based scheme that a public key does not need to be certificated, the certification authority mechanism will not be needed and the key exchange overhead can be reduced. With these advantages of our scheme, it is well suited for mobile pay-TV system.     

位置透明的MA可靠消息传递机制

移动Agent系统中的通信机制多由RMI加上消息发送机制实现，在现有的三种主流消息发送机制上进行改进，提出了新的消息转发策略——资源分散模型(Resource Distributed Model)。RDM提供了一种类似于结合了Homeagent和按路径转发方式的寻址策略，达到消息可达的目的，基于RDM的移动服务(Mobile Service)是一种在快速寻址后将消息快速转发的方式，MS减少了消息缓存部件的消息缓存量，并可用多个MS同时寻址从而提高消息发送速度。     

一种高性能的全序组播算法

全序组播是构建分布式应用程序的一种重要组通信原语,它能够保证一个通信组中的所有成员都按照同样的顺序接收消息.目前的全序组播算法不能同时获取低延迟和高吞吐量,并且缺乏对应用程序通信模式的适应性,因此不适用于高性能计算环境.在分析已有算法排序机制基础上,指出影响全序组播算法性能的关键因素,并提出一种基于leader/followers模式和阻塞检测机制的新算法.算法工作原理如下:每一个组成员都可以在任意时刻发送消息,但只能提交来自当前leader成员的消息;一旦leader成员进入不活跃状态,则通过特殊的命令来指定某个活跃的follower成员为新的leader成员.模拟实验结果表明,该算法在延迟时间和吞吐量等性能指标方面都优于已有算法,同时在突发消息模式下能够大幅度提升性能.