Adaptive recovery for mobile environments

Abstract

Mobile computing allows ubiquitous and continuous access to computing resources while the users travel or work at a client’s site. The flexibility introduced by mobile computing brings new challenges to the area of fault tolerance. Failures that were rare with fixed hosts become common, and host disconnection makes fault detection and message coordination difficult. This paper describes a new checkpoint protocol that is well adapted to mobile environments. The protocol uses time to indirectly coordinate the creation of new global states, avoiding all message exchanges. The protocol uses two different types of checkpoints to adapt to the current network characteristics, and to trade off performance with recovery time.