A Checkpointing Algorithm for Mobile Computing Environment

Abstract

Abstract. Mobile computing is going to change the way, computers are used today. However mobile computing environment has features like high mobility, frequent disconnections, and lack of resources, such as memory and battery power. Such features make applications, running on mobile devices, more susceptible to faults. Checkpointing is a major technique to confine faults and restart applications faster. In this paper, we present a coordinated checkpointing algorithm for deterministic applications. We are using anti-messages along-with selective logging to achieve faster recovery and reduced energy consumption. Our algorithm is non-blocking in nature and avoids unnecessary computation. We ask only minimum number of processes to take the checkpoint and also take in to account the limited storage available at mobile devices.

Anti-message Logging based Check pointing Algorithm for Mobile Distributed Systems

“…Singh and Cabillic [13] proposed a checkpointing algorithm for mobile computing environments on the basis of anti-message logging. This algorithm may lead to inconsistencies as follows.…”

“…Each process progresses at its own speed and messages are exchanged through reliable channels, whose transmission delays are finite but arbitrary. We also assume that the processes are deterministic as in [11], [12], [13].…”

“…The blocking time of the Koo-Toueg [4] protocol is highest, followed by Cao-Singhal [6] algorithm. The other schemes are non-blocking [2,3,13], like the proposed one. In Elnozahy et al [3] algorithm, all processes are required to take their checkpoints in an initiation.…”

“…By doing so, we are able to reduce the loss of checkpointing effort in case of abort of the checkpointing procedure in the first phase. In other algorithms [2,3,4,6,13], in case of abort in the first phase, all concerned processes are forced to abort their tentative checkpoint whereas in the proposed scheme, all relevant processes abort their ad hoc checkpoints only. The effort of taking an ad hoc checkpoint is negligible as compared to tentative one in the mobile distributed system [2].…”

A Review of Fault Tolerant Checkpointing Protocols for Mobile Computing Systems

“…Singh and Cabillic [71] proposed a minimum-process nonintrusive coordinated checkpointing protocol for deterministic mobile systems. In the first phase, a process starts checkpointing as checkpoint initiator by sending requests to processes over which it directly depends.…”