A Survey on Reliability Estimation Techniques for Mobile Agent based Systems

Mobile Agent based Systems (MAS) is one of the fastest growing and emerging areas for application development in recent past. A mobile agent is a computer program that acts autonomously on behalf of a user or application moving in the heterogeneous communication environment. To ensure fault and failure free operation of mobile agent based commercial applications, reliability issues need to be addressed. In this paper, we present a complete survey of various techniques for estimation of reliability of MAS on the basis of factors that affect it. The survey concludes that reliability estimation techniques of MAS developed so far are based on aggregation of certain combinations of attributes in a specific environment. But, due to complex and dynamic nature of MAS, there is a great potential of further research in the area of their reliability assessment.