A Novel Self-Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Mechanism and Its Application for a Dynamic Pervasive Computing Environment

In pervasive computing system, the increasing dynamic and complexity of software and hardware resources and frequentative interaction among function components make fault-tolerant design very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel self-adaptive fault-tolerant mechanism for a dynamic pervasive computing environment such as mobile ad hoc network. In our approach, the self-adaptive fault-tolerant mechanism is dynamically built according to various types of detected faults based on continuous monitoring and analysis of the component states. We put forward the architecture of fault-tolerant system and the policy-based fault-tolerant scheme, which adopts three-dimensional array of core features to capture spatial and temporal variability and the Event-Condition-Action rules. The mentioned mechanism has been designed and implemented as self-adaptive fault-tolerant middleware, shortly called SAFTM, on a preliminary prototype for a dynamic pervasive computing environment such as mobile ad hoc network. We have performed the experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the fault-tolerant mechanism. The results of the experiments show that the performance of the self-adaptive fault tolerant mechanism is realistic.