Minimum Process Coordinated Checkpointing Scheme for Ad Hoc Networks

The wireless mobile ad hoc network (MANET) architecture is one consisting of a set of mobile hosts capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of base stations. This has made possible creating a mobile distributed computing environment and has also brought several new challenges in distributed protocol design. In this paper, we study a very fundamental problem, the fault tolerance problem, in a MANET environment and propose a minimum process coordinated checkpointing scheme. Since potential problems of this new environment are insufficient power and limited storage capacity, the proposed scheme tries to reduce the amount of information saved for recovery. The MANET structure used in our algorithm is hierarchical based. The scheme is based for Cluster Based Routing Protocol (CBRP) which belongs to a class of Hierarchical Reactive routing protocols. The protocol proposed by us is nonblocking coordinated checkpointing algorithm suitable for ad hoc environments. It produces a consistent set of checkpoints; the algorithm makes sure that only minimum number of nodes in the cluster are required to take checkpoints; it uses very few control messages. Performance analysis shows that our algorithm outperforms the existing related works and is a novel idea in the field. Firstly, we describe an organization of the cluster. Then we propose a minimum process coordinated checkpointing scheme for cluster based ad hoc routing protocols.