Soft-Checkpointing Based Hybrid Synchronous Checkpointing Protocol for Mobile Distributed Systems

Abstract

Minimum-process coordinated checkpointing is a suitable approach to introduce fault tolerance in mobile distributed systems transparently. In order to balance the checkpointing overhead and the loss of computation on recovery, the authors propose a hybrid checkpointing algorithm, wherein an all-process coordinated checkpoint is taken after the execution of minimum-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm for a fixed number of times. In coordinated checkpointing, if a single process fails to take its checkpoint; all the checkpointing effort goes waste, because, each process has to abort its tentative checkpoint. In order to take the tentative checkpoint, an MH (Mobile Host) needs to transfer large checkpoint data to its local MSS over wireless channels. In this regard, the authors propose that in the first phase, all concerned MHs will take soft checkpoint only. Soft checkpoint is similar to mutable checkpoint. In this case, if some process fails to take checkpoint in the first phase, then MHs need to abort their soft checkpoints only. The effort of taking a soft checkpoint is negligibly small as compared to the tentative one. In the minimum-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm, an effort has been made to minimize the number of useless checkpoints and blocking of processes using probabilistic approach.

A Low-overhead Minimum Process Coordinated Checkpointing Algorithm for Mobile Distributed System

“…In order to record a consistent global checkpoint, when a process takes a checkpoint, it asks (by sending checkpoint requests to) all relevant processes to take checkpoints. Therefore, coordinated checkpointing suffers from high overhead associated with the checkpointing process [20], [21], [22], [23]. Much of the previous work [2,3,4,20,21,22,23] in coordinated checkpointing has focused on minimizing the number of synchronization messages and the number of checkpoints during the checkpointing process.…”

“…Therefore, coordinated checkpointing suffers from high overhead associated with the checkpointing process [20], [21], [22], [23]. Much of the previous work [2,3,4,20,21,22,23] in coordinated checkpointing has focused on minimizing the number of synchronization messages and the number of checkpoints during the checkpointing process. However, some algorithms (called blocking algorithm) force all relevant processes in the system to block their computations during the checkpointing process [3,9,21,22,23].…”

IMCLA: Performance Evaluation of Integrated Multilevel Checkpointing Algorithms using Checkpointing Efficiency

“…Young proposed a first-order model that describes the optimal checkpointing interval in terms of checkpoint overhead and mean time to interruption (MTTI). Young"s model does not consider failures during checkpointing and recovery [54], while Daly"s extension lead of Young"s model, a higher-order approximation, does [55].…”

“…Checkpointing overheads [55], [56], [57], [58] have been discussed by many researchers. An integrated checkpointing algorithm implements in parallel with the essential computation.…”