Transactional Peer-to-Peer Information Processing:The AMOR Approach

Klaus Haller, Heiko Schuldt, Hans-Jörg Schek

In Proceedings

2003/3

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM’2003)

Melbourne, Australia

Mobile agent applications are a promising approach to cope with the ever increasing amount of data and services available in large networks (e.g., corporate intranets or the Internet). By using mobile agent technology, a user no longer has to manually browse for certain data and/or services but rather to submit a mobile personal agent that accesses and processes information on her/his behalf (i.e., places orders or bids in some electronic auctions, or fixes dates). These mobile agents operate on top of a peer-to-peer network spanned by the individual providers of data and services. However, support for the correct concurrent and fault-tolerant execution of multiple agents accessing shared resources is vital to agent-based information processing. This paper addresses this problem and shows how agent-based information processing can be enriched by dedicated transactional semantics - despite of the lack of global control which is an inherent characteristic of peer-to-peer environments. We introduce the AMOR project (Agents, MObility, and tRansactions) and we show how conventional concurrency control and recovery protocols have to be extended and generalized such that they can be implemented in a decentralized way and be applied in a truly distributed peer-to-peer environment.