A Highly Available Replicated File System for Resource-Constrained Windows CE .Net Devices

The emergence of more powerful and resourceful mobile devices, as well as new wireless communication technologies, is turning the concept of mobile ad-hoc networking into a viable and promising solution for ubiquitous information sharing. However, the inherent characteristics of mobile ad-hoc networks bring up important challenges for any embedded application developed with the goal of information sharing in the novel usage scenarios enabled by mobile ad-hoc environments. This paper proposes transparent system-level support for Windows CE.Net applications by means of a replicated file system, Haddock-FS. Haddock-FS is based on an adaptable optimistic consistency protocol that provides a highly available access to a weakly consistent view of file, while delivering a strongly consistent view to more demanding applications. In order to effectively cope with the network bandwidth and device memory constraints of these environments, Haddock-FS employs a cross-file, cross-version content similarity exploitation mechanism.