Low Cost Coordinated Checkpointing Algorithm for Mobile Distributed Systems

Abstract

Checkpointing is an efficient fault tolerance technique used in distributed systems. Due to the emerging challenges of the mobile distributed system as low bandwidth, mobility, lack of stable storage, frequent disconnections and limited battery life, the fault tolerance technique designed for distributed system can not directly implemented on mobile distributed systems. Hence, the checkpointing algorithms having lesser number of coordinated messages and fewer checkpoints nearly to minimum are preferred for mobile environment. But both number of coordinated message and number of checkpoints are orthogonal. As time based approach uses lesser number of coordinated message but have higher number of checkpoints than minimum number of checkpoints required. On the other hand coordinated checkpointing approach takes lesser checkpoints than time based nearly to minimum but have higher coordinated message. Our proposed coordinated checkpointing approach use time to indirectly coordinate to minimizing the number of coordinated message transmitted through the wireless link and reduces the number of checkpoints nearest to the minimum. The algorithm is non-blocking and forces only minimum number dependent process to takes their checkpoints.