An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

Building Regular Registers with Rational Malicious Servers and Anonymous Clients

The paper addresses the problem of emulating a regular register in a synchronous distributed system where clients invoking $$\mathsf{read}()$$ and $$\mathsf{write}()$$ operations are anonymous while server processes maintaining the state of the register may be compromised by rational adversaries (i.e., a server might behave as rational malicious Byzantine process). We first model our problem as a Bayesian game between a client and a rational malicious server where the equilibrium depends on the decisions of the malicious server (behave correctly and not be detected by clients vs returning a wrong register value to clients with the risk of being detected and then excluded by the computation). We prove such equilibrium exists and finally we design a protocol implementing the regular register that forces the rational malicious server to behave correctly

Intelligent multimedia communication for enhanced medical e-collaboration in back pain treatment

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 SAGE PublicationsRemote, multimedia-based, collaboration in back pain treatment is an option which only recently has come to the attention of clinicians and IT providers. The take-up of such applications will inevitably depend on their ability to produce an acceptable level of service over congested and unreliable public networks. However, although the problem of multimedia application-level performance is closely linked to both the user perspective of the experience as well as to the service provided by the underlying network, it is rarely studied from an integrated viewpoint. To alleviate this problem, we propose an intelligent mechanism that integrates user-related requirements with the more technical characterization of quality of service, obtaining a priority order of low-level quality of service parameters, which would ensure that user-centred quality of perception is maintained at an optimum level. We show how our framework is capable of suggesting appropriately tailored transmission protocols, by incorporating user requirements in the remote delivery of e-health solutions

An immune system paradigm for the assurance of dependability of collaborative self-organizing systems

In collaborative self-organizing computing systems a complex task is performed by relatively simple autonomous agents that act without centralized control. Disruption of a task can be caused by agents that produce harmful outputs due to internal failures or due to maliciously introduced alterations of their functions. The probability of such harmful outputs is minimized by the application of a design principle called ”the immune system paradigm” that provides individual agents with an all-hardware fault tolerance infrastructure. The paradigm and its application are described in this paper.1st IFIP International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cooperative Computing - Biological Inspiration: Just a dream?Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

An immune system paradigm for the assurance of dependability of collaborative self-organizing systems

In collaborative self-organizing computing systems a complex task is performed by relatively simple autonomous agents that act without centralized control. Disruption of a task can be caused by agents that produce harmful outputs due to internal failures or due to maliciously introduced alterations of their functions. The probability of such harmful outputs is minimized by the application of a design principle called ”the immune system paradigm” that provides individual agents with an all-hardware fault tolerance infrastructure. The paradigm and its application are described in this paper.1st IFIP International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cooperative Computing - Biological Inspiration: Just a dream?Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI