A Low Overhead Minimum Process Global Snapshop Collection Algorithm for Mobile Distributed System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-overhead, non-blocking, minimum-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm tailored for mobile distributed systems, effectively reducing communication, memory, and computation overheads while ensuring fault tolerance.

Contribution

It presents a novel checkpointing algorithm that minimizes process involvement and communication overheads without blocking processes, specifically designed for mobile distributed environments.

Findings

Reduces communication message overhead in mobile systems

Avoids useless checkpoints and process blocking

Decreases latency in global checkpointing operations

Abstract

Coordinated checkpointing is an effective fault tolerant technique in distributed system as it avoids the domino effect and require minimum storage requirement. Most of the earlier coordinated checkpoint algorithms block their computation during checkpointing and forces minimum-process or non-blocking but forces all nodes to takes checkpoint even though many of them may not be necessary or non-blocking minimum-process but takes useless checkpoints or reduced useless checkpoint but has higher synchronization message overhead or has high checkpoint request propagation time. Hence in mobile distributed systems there is a great need of minimizing the number of communication message and checkpointing overhead as it raise new issues such as mobility, low bandwidth of wireless channels, frequently disconnections, limited battery power and lack of reliable stable storage on mobile nodes. In this paper, we propose a minimum-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm for mobile distributed system where no useless checkpoints are taken, no blocking of processes takes place and enforces a minimum-number of processes to take checkpoints. Our algorithm imposes low memory and computation overheads on MH's and low communication overheads on wireless channels. It avoids awakening of an MH if it is not required to take its checkpoint and has reduced latency time as each process involved in a global checkpoint can forward its own decision directly to the checkpoint initiator.