Towards building a fault tolerant and conflict-free distributed file system for mobile clients

The rising demand for mobile computing has created a need for improved file system that supports mobile clients. Current file systems with support for mobility provide availability through file replicas that are cached at the client side. However, mobile clients may experience different obstacles in regard to the local cache, such as the limited network bandwidth, the intermittent connection, and serious conflicts when synchronizing back to the server, to mention a few. In this paper, we propose a novel fault tolerant and conflict free distributed file system for mobile clients, which provides high available and reliable storage for files and guarantees that file operations are executed in spite of concurrency and failures. The design is intended to fit mobile clients (e.g., PDAs and cell phones) that have limited storage space and can not store all data they need, yet they require to access these data at all times. We present our mobile file system model, describe its implementation, and report on its performance evaluation using an extensive set of simulation experiments. Our results indicate clearly that our model exhibits a significant degree of automation and conflict-free mobile file system.