Title: A weighted checkpointing protocol for mobile distributed systems

Authors: Lalit K. Awasthi, Manoj Misra, R.C. Joshi

Addresses: Computer Science Department, NIT Hamirpur, 177005, India. ' Electronics and Computer Department, IIT Roorkee, 247667, India. ' Electronics and Computer Department, IIT Roorkee, 247667, India

Abstract: Here, we propose a weighted checkpointing approach for Mobile Distributed Computing Systems (MDCSs) that significantly reduces checkpointing overheads on mobile nodes. Checkpointing protocols can be coordinated, log-based or quasi-synchronous. Coordinated checkpointing requires extra synchronisation messages and may block the underlying computation. In quasi-synchronous approach, processes have limited autonomy in checkpointing but all nodes need not checkpoint concurrently. Such protocols guarantee consistent global state but results in dynamic checkpointing overheads. To minimise these overheads, we propose a weighted checkpointing protocol that requires no synchronisation messages, reduces the checkpointing overheads at mobile nodes but requires logging for mobile nodes. Simulation results show that the new approach is better than quasi-synchronous approach.

Keywords: mobile computing; m-computing; fault tolerance; coordinated checkpointing; domino effect; consistent global state; snapshot; independent checkpointing; quasi-synchronous checkpointing; distributed computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2010.032227

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2010 Vol.5 No.3, pp.137 - 149

Published online: 17 Mar 2010 *

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