A New Distiributed Checkpointing Scheme for the Mobile Computing Environment

Abstract

During the past decade, there were drastic advances in the technology of the mobile computing environment. Such technical improvements give birth to a demand for running sophisticated applications over multiple mobile devices. Since more than one process executes concurrently in this computing environment and they have to send application data to each other, any failure on a process or a network connection may result in serious problems. Against such failure on distributed applications, many algorithms are devised. In this paper we also devise a new distributed checkpointing scheme very suitable for the mobile distributed applications. For our checkpointing scheme, we propose two key ideas of a checkpoint-related software agent, called checkpointing agent (CA), and a flexible checkpointing protocol. The CA is used to make consistent global checkpoints on behalf of application processes. Since the CA's communicate with each other via wired fixed networks, we can reduce network overheads paid for delivering checkpoint-related data via wirelesses networks.