A novel min-process checkpointing scheme for mobile computing systems

In distributed computing systems, processes in different hosts take checkpoints to survive failures. For mobile computing systems, due to certain new characteristics such as mobility, low bandwidth, disconnection, low power consumption and limited memory, conventional distributed checkpointing schemes need to be reconsidered. In this paper, a novel min-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm that makes full use of the computation ability and power of mobile support stations is proposed. During normal computation message transmission, the checkpoint dependency information among mobile hosts is recorded in the corresponding mobile support stations. When a checkpointing procedure begins, the initiator concurrently informs relevant mobile hosts, which minimizes the identifying time. Moreover, compared with the existing coordinated checkpointing schemes, our algorithm blocks the minimum number of mobile support stations during the identifying procedure, which leads to the improvement of the system performance. In addition, the proposed algorithm is a min-process, domino-free checkpointing algorithm, which is especially desirable for mobile computing systems. Quantitative analysis and experimental simulation show that our algorithm outperforms other coordinated checkpointing schemes in terms of the identifying time and the number of blocked mobile support stations and then can provide a better system performance for mobile computing systems. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.