Distributed checkpointing based on influential messages

In distributed applications, a group of multiple objects are cooperated to achieve some objectives. The computation on the objects are based on the massage passing, i.e. remote procedure call. The objects may suffer from different kinds of faults. In the presence of the object faults, the states of the objects in the system have to be kept consistent. If some object o is faulty, o is rolled back to the checkpoint and objects which have received messages from o are also required to be rolled back. In this paper, we define influential messages whose receivers are required to be rolled back from the application point of view if the senders are rolled back on the basis of the message semantics. By using the influential messages, we would like to define a significant checkpoint which denotes a consistent global state of the system but might be inconsistent from the traditional definition. We would like to present protocols for taking the significant checkpoint and for rolling back the objects by using the influential messages.