Fault tolerance is essential to the development of reliable mobile agent systems in order to guarantee continuous execution of mobile agents. For this purpose, previous work has proposed fault tolerant protocols for mobile agent execution based on stage construction. However, when previous protocols are applied to a multiregion mobile agent computing environment, the overhead of work such as monitoring, election, voting and agreement is increased. We propose a region-based stage construction (RBSC) protocol for fault tolerant execution of mobile agents in a multiregion mobile agent computing environment. The RBSC protocol uses new concepts of quasiparticipant and substage in order to put together some places located in different regions within a stage in the same region. Therefore, the RBSC protocol decreases the overhead of stage works. Consequently, the RBSC protocol decreases the total execution time of mobile agents.

This paper proposes a restoration scheme based on mobility learning and prediction in the presence of the failure of mobility databases in personal communication systems (PCSs). In PCSs, mobility databases must maintain the current location information of users to provide a fast connection for them. However, the malfunction of mobility databases may cause some location information to be lost. As a result, without an explicit restoration procedure, incoming calls to users may be rejected. Therefore, an explicit restoration scheme against the malfunction of mobility databases is needed to guarantee continuous service availability to users. Introducing mobility learning and prediction into the restoration process allows systems to locate users after a failure of mobility databases. In failure-free operations, the movement patterns of users are learned by a neuro-fuzzy inference system (NFIS). After a failure, an inference process of the NFIS is initiated and the users' future location is predicted. This is used to locate lost users after a failure. This proposal differs from previous approaches using a checkpoint because it does not need a backup process nor additional storage space to store checkpoint information. In addition, simulations show that our proposal can reduce the cost needed to restore the location records of lost users after a failure when compared to the checkpointing scheme.

This paper presents a hybrid checkpointing protocol-an asynchronous checkpointing protocol using a message sending/receiving state change for reducing the overhead of failure-free operation combined with a selective sender-based message logging protocol for reducing the cascade rollback of asynchronous checkpointing protocol. The selective sender-based message logging protocol records only potential orphan messages when taking a checkpoint. And this paper presents a message dependency tree recording the inter-process message sending/receiving information on a volatile storage for reducing the search time of inter-process information during the failure recovery.