Low-Overhead Non-Blocking Checkpointing Scheme for Mobile Computing Systems

When applied to mobile computing systems, checkpoint protocols for distributed computing systems would face many new challenges, such as low wireless bandwidth, frequent disconnections, and lack of stable storage at mobile hosts. This paper proposes a novel checkpoint protocol to effectively reduce the coordinating overhead. By using a communication vector, only a few processes participate in the checkpointing event. During checkpointing, the scheme can save the time used to trace the dependency tree by sending checkpoint requests to dependent processes at once. In addition, processes are non-blocking in this scheme, since the inconsistency is resolved by the piggyback technique. Hence the unnecessary and orphan messages can be avoided. Compared with the traditional coordinated checkpoint approach, the proposed non-blocking algorithm obtains a minimal number of processes to take checkpoints. It also reduces the checkpoint latency, which brings less overhead to mobile host with limited resources.