A Minimum-Process Coordinated Checkpointing Protocol For Mobile Distributed System

While dealing with Mobile Distributed systems, we come across some issues like: mobility, low bandwidth of wireless channels and lack of stable storage on mobile nodes, disconnections, limited battery power and high failure rate of mobile nodes. These issues make traditional checkpointing techniques designed for Distributed systems unsuitable for Mobile environments. In this paper, we design a minimum process algorithm for Mobile Distributed systems, where no useless checkpoints are taken and an effort has been made to optimize the blocking of processes. We propose to delay the processing of selective messages at the receiver end only during the checkpointing period. A Process is allowed to perform its normal computations and send messages during its blocking period. In this way, we try to keep blocking of processes to bare minimum. We captured the transitive dependencies during the normal execution by piggybacking dependency vectors onto computational messages. In this way, we try to reduce the Checkpointing time by avoiding formation of Checkpointing tree. The Z-dependencies are well taken care of. The proposed scheme forces zero useless checkpoints at the cost of very small blocking.