A Fault-Tolerant Approach to Alleviate Failures in Offloading Systems

Abstract

Computation offloading effectively expands the usability of mobile terminals beyond their physical limits, and also greatly extends their battery charging intervals. Offloading or cyber foraging is a technique by which large and complex computational jobs are relocated from lightweight portable devices (such as smartphones) called offloadee to powerful servers (such as nearby laptops/desktops or cloud server over the Internet) called surrogates, and getting the output back at the offloadee. Many research works have been done so far on the architecture of offloading systems, but only few works can be found on fault detection and tolerance. So this paper concentrates on categorizing different failures that may affect the benefit of offloading computation and proposes a fault-tolerance approach to alleviate those faults. The checkpoint based fault-tolerance approach proposed in this paper is able to handle crash, omission and transient failures altogether. Fault prevention is obtained by utilizing historical data for choosing worthy surrogate from known neighborhood. This fault tolerance model is evaluated by applying a real application named $$\pi$$calculator and Scimark benchmark suite. The system is implemented and the proposed approach is found to be effective with respect to energy consumption and resource utilization even in case of crash and omission failure.