Sama: A Scalable Group Communication Mechanism for Mobile Agents

Abstract

Abstract. Provision of fast and scalable group communication for mobile agents can considerably improve their efficiency. Unfortunately, most of the existing approaches do not scale well when the number of agents grows. In this paper, we propose Sama, a new group communication mechanism, to speed up message delivery to a group of mobile agents. The main contribution of Sama is distribution and parallelization of message propagation in an efficient way to achieve scalability and speed up message delivery to the group members. Sama uses Message Dispatcher Objects (MDOs), which are stationary agents on each host, to propagate messages in a parallel manner. The proposed mechanism is independent of agent locations and transparently delivers messages to the group using a constant number of remote messages. Experimental results show that message delivery time is significantly reduced in Sama compared to the previously proposed methods