MobileRE: A replicas prioritized hybrid fault tolerance strategy for mobile distributed system

Abstract

Fault tolerance techniques are of vital importance to promise data reliability for mobile distributed system. In mobile environments, nodes suffer from high failure probability and fluctuating bandwidth. Thus, traditional fault tolerance techniques are no longer suitable. In this paper, we present a replica prioritized hybrid fault tolerance strategy combining erasure codes and replicas for a mobile distributed system (MobileRE), to guarantee data reliability with dynamic network status. In MobileRE, we first formulate a reliability cost rate to indicate the cost of ensuring data reliability of the mobile system. MobileRE further adaptively applies the erasure codes and replicas algorithms based on real-time network bandwidth status to minimize system reliability cost rate. MobileRE also obtains the optimal reliability cost rate by customizing redundant configuration parameters. The numerical and simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed schemes, and show that compared with traditional designs that only adopt erasure codes or replicas, MobileRE can significantly reduce the system reliability cost rate.