Consistent global checkpoints in multimedia network systems

To achieve a fault-tolerant distributed systems, checkpoint-recovery has been researched and many protocols have been designed. A global checkpoint taken by the protocols have to be consistent. For a conventional data communication network, a global checkpoint is defined consistent if there is neither orphan nor lost message. For a multimedia communication network, there are different requirements such as large-size massages, time-constrained failure free execution and allowance of a certain amount of lost packets. This paper proposes a new criteria of consistent global checkpoints for supporting a multimedia communication network. In addition, a checkpoint protocol with QoS based consistency is designed and applied to MPEG-2 data transmission