Chapter 6. From Garbage Collection to Controll Mechanisms for Mobile Agents

Abstract

We have seen in the last chapter that in the area of distributed garbage collection algorithms exist, that detect whether one object is garbage depending on the number of references held by others. These other objects fit our definition of a dependency object in Definition 2-1 quite precisely, if we define a parent relation as “holds reference”. The problem of garbage collection is thus similar to the orphan detection problem for mobile agents. Moreover, the path created by local reference counters is similar to the paths in the path concept, i.e. in some algorithms we have an analogue to the problem how an agent can be found. Thus solutions that are similar to those proposed in Chapter 4 for the control of mobile agents have been developed in the area of distributed garbage collection.