On the impossibility of min-process non-blocking checkpointing and an efficient checkpointing algorithm for mobile computing systems

Mobile computing raises many new issues, such as lack of stable storage, low bandwidth of wireless channel, high mobility, and limited battery life. These new issues make traditional checkpointing algorithms unsuitable. R. Prakash and M. Singhal (1996) proposed the first coordinated checkpointing algorithm for mobile computing systems. However we showed that their algorithm may result in an inconsistency. In this paper, we prove a more general result about coordinated checkpointing: there does not exist a non-blocking algorithm that forces only a minimum number of processes to take their checkpoints. Based on the proof, we propose an efficient algorithm for mobile computing systems, which forces only a minimum number of processes to take checkpoints and dramatically reduces the blocking time during the checkpointing process. Correctness proofs and performance analysis of the algorithm are provided.