Adaptive checkpointing for fault tolerance in an autonomous mobile computing grid

The widespread availability and increasing processing power of mobile devices has lead to a focus towards the development of autonomous mobile computing grids (MoGs). Such mobile grids allow the successful execution of distributed applications; without access to any static nodes or wired networks. However, the implementation of a fault tolerance technique is essential to completely utilize the mobile devices as viable computing resources. Checkpointing is a well explored fault tolerance technique for mobile computing systems. The paper presents an adaptive checkpointing technique for failure recovery of mobile nodes in a MoG. The presented protocol relies on cooperative checkpointing by the constituent nodes in the system. A node uses the stable storage of other nodes in the system to save its checkpoint data, in case the requisite stable storage is not available at the node itself. Further, depending on the availability of resources in the MoG, the scheme replicates a node´s checkpoint data at multiple nodes. The results of simulation for the presented scheme verify that the introduction of redundancy with the checkpointing procedure vastly increases the likelihood of successful recovery of a failed node in a MoG.