Checkpointing protocols in distributed systems with mobile hosts: A performance analysis

Checkpointing distributed applications involving mobile hosts is an important task to reduce the rollback during a recovery from a failure and to manage voluntary disconnections. In this paper we show the basic characteristics a checkpointing protocol needs to work with mobile hosts, namely, reduction of the number of checkpoints, the use of incremental checkpointing and consistent global checkpoint built on the fly. Previous points must be implemented by using as small control information as possible and ensuring little rollback. A comparative analysis of the performance of some interesting communication-induced checkpointing protocols, adapted to a mobile setting, is presented. The analysis has been carried out by using discrete event simulation and several models have been considered for the hosts mobility.