A low-cost hybrid coordinated checkpointing protocol for mobile distributed systems

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kumar, Parveen

Affiliations: Department of Computer Sc & Engineering, Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology, Panipal (Haryana), India. Tel.: +91 0180 2620043; E-mail: pk223475@yahoo.com

Abstract: Mobile distributed systems raise new issues such as mobility, low bandwidth of wireless channels, disconnections, limited battery power and lack of reliable stable storage on mobile nodes. In minimum-process coordinated checkpointing, some processes may not checkpoint for several checkpoint initiations. In the case of a recovery after a fault, such processes may rollback to far earlier checkpointed state and thus may cause greater loss of computation. In all-process coordinated checkpointing, the recovery line is advanced for all processes but the checkpointing overhead may be exceedingly high. To optimize both matrices, the checkpointing overhead and the loss of computation on recovery, we propose a hybrid checkpointing algorithm, wherein an all-process coordinated checkpoint is taken after the execution of minimum-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm for a fixed number of times. Thus, the Mobile nodes with low activity or in doze mode operation may not be disturbed in the case of minimum-process checkpointing and the recovery line is advanced for each process after an all-process checkpoint. Additionally, we try to minimize the information piggybacked onto each computation message. For minimum-process checkpointing, we design a blocking algorithm, where no useless checkpoints are taken and an effort has been made to optimize the blocking of processes. We propose to delay selective messages at the receiver end. By doing so, processes are allowed to perform their normal computation, send messages and partially receive them during their blocking period. The proposed minimum-process blocking algorithm forces zero useless checkpoints at the cost of very small blocking.

Keywords: Fault tolerance, consistent global state, coordinated checkpointing and mobile systems

Journal: Mobile Information Systems, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 13-32, 2008