Low overhead optimal checkpointing for mobile distributed systems

A checkpoint algorithm for a mobile distributed computing system (MDCS) needs to handle many new issues like: mobility, low bandwidth of wireless channels, lack of stable storage on mobile nodes, disconnections, limited battery power and high failure rate of mobile nodes. These issues make traditional checkpointing techniques unsuitable for mobile distributed systems. Coordinated checkpointing may be useful to checkpoint MDCS if it is nonblocking and require minimum number of processes to checkpoint. Cao and Singhal [G. Cao et al., (2001)] achieved both by introducing the concept of mutable checkpoints. Many of these mutable checkpoints may be useless. We propose a nonblocking minimum process coordinated checkpointing protocol that not only minimizes useless checkpoints but also minimizes overall bandwidth required over wireless channels.