Sensornet checkpointing: enabling repeatability in testbeds and realism in simulations

When developing sensor network applications, the shift from simulation to testbed causes application failures, resulting in additional time-consuming iterations between simulation and testbed. We propose transferring sensor network checkpoints between simulation and testbed to reduce the gap between simulation and testbed. Sensornet checkpointing combines the best of both simulation and testbeds: the nonintrusiveness and repeatability of simulation, and the realism of testbeds

Rollback recovery with low overhead for fault tolerance in mobile ad hoc networks

AbstractMobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have significantly enhanced the wireless networks by eliminating the need for any fixed infrastructure. Hence, these are increasingly being used for expanding the computing capacity of existing networks or for implementation of autonomous mobile computing Grids. However, the fragile nature of MANETs makes the constituent nodes susceptible to failures and the computing potential of these networks can be utilized only if they are fault tolerant. The technique of checkpointing based rollback recovery has been used effectively for fault tolerance in static and cellular mobile systems; yet, the implementation of existing protocols for MANETs is not straightforward. The paper presents a novel rollback recovery protocol for handling the failures of mobile nodes in a MANET using checkpointing and sender based message logging. The proposed protocol utilizes the routing protocol existing in the network for implementing a low overhead recovery mechanism. The presented recovery procedure at a node is completely domino-free and asynchronous. The protocol is resilient to the dynamic characteristics of the MANET; allowing a distributed application to be executed independently without access to any wired Grid or cellular network access points. We also present an algorithm to record a consistent global snapshot of the MANET

ALGORITHMS FOR FAULT TOLERANCE IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND ROUTING IN AD HOC NETWORKS

Checkpointing and rollback recovery are well-known techniques for coping with failures in distributed systems. Future generation Supercomputers will be message passing distributed systems consisting of millions of processors. As the number of processors grow, failure rate also grows. Thus, designing efficient checkpointing and recovery algorithms for coping with failures in such large systems is important for these systems to be fully utilized. We presented a novel communication-induced checkpointing algorithm which helps in reducing contention for accessing stable storage to store checkpoints. Under our algorithm, a process involved in a distributed computation can independently initiate consistent global checkpointing by saving its current state, called a tentative checkpoint. Other processes involved in the computation come to know about the consistent global checkpoint initiation through information piggy-backed with the application messages or limited control messages if necessary. When a process comes to know about a new consistent global checkpoint initiation, it takes a tentative checkpoint after processing the message. The tentative checkpoints taken can be flushed to stable storage when there is no contention for accessing stable storage. The tentative checkpoints together with the message logs stored in the stable storage form a consistent global checkpoint. Ad hoc networks consist of a set of nodes that can form a network for communication with each other without the aid of any infrastructure or human intervention. Nodes are energy-constrained and hence routing algorithm designed for these networks should take this into consideration. We proposed two routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks which prevent nodes from broadcasting route requests unnecessarily during the route discovery phase and hence conserve energy and prevent contention in the network. One is called Triangle Based Routing (TBR) protocol. The other routing protocol we designed is called Routing Protocol with Selective Forwarding (RPSF). Both of the routing protocols greatly reduce the number of control packets which are needed to establish routes between pairs of source nodes and destination nodes. As a result, they reduce the energy consumed for route discovery. Moreover, these protocols reduce congestion and collision of packets due to limited number of nodes retransmitting the route requests

MobiStreams: A Reliable Distributed Stream Processing System for Mobile Devices

Multi-core phones are now pervasive. Yet, existing applications rely predominantly on a client-server computing paradigm, using phones only as thin clients, sending sensed information via the cellular network to servers for processing. This makes the cellular network the bottleneck, limiting overall application performance. In this paper, we propose Mobi Streams, a Distributed Stream Processing System (DSPS) that runs directly on smartphones. Mobi Streams can offload computing from remote servers to local phones and thus alleviate the pressure on the cellular network. Implementing DSPS on smartphones faces significant challenges: 1) multiple phones can readily fail simultaneously, and 2) the phones' ad-hoc WiFi network has low bandwidth. Mobi Streams tackles these challenges through two new techniques: 1) token-triggered check pointing, and 2) broadcast-based check pointing. Our evaluations driven by two real world applications deployed in the US and Singapore show that migrating from a server platform to a smartphone platform eliminates the cellular network bottleneck, leading to 0.78~42.6X throughput increase and 10%~94.8% latency decrease. Also, Mobi Streams' fault tolerance scheme increases throughput by 230% and reduces latency by 40% vs. prior state-of-the-art fault-tolerant DSPSs

Design and analysis of an efficient energy algorithm in wireless social sensor networks

Because mobile ad hoc networks have characteristics such as lack of center nodes, multi-hop routing and changeable topology, the existing checkpoint technologies for normal mobile networks cannot be applied well to mobile ad hoc networks. Considering the multi-frequency hierarchy structure of ad hoc networks, this paper proposes a hybrid checkpointing strategy which combines the techniques of synchronous checkpointing with asynchronous checkpointing, namely the checkpoints of mobile terminals in the same cluster remain synchronous, and the checkpoints in different clusters remain asynchronous. This strategy could not only avoid cascading rollback among the processes in the same cluster, but also avoid too many message transmissions among the processes in different clusters. What is more, it can reduce the communication delay. In order to assure the consistency of the global states, this paper discusses the correctness criteria of hybrid checkpointing, which includes the criteria of checkpoint taking, rollback recovery and indelibility. Based on the designed Intra-Cluster Checkpoint Dependence Graph and Inter-Cluster Checkpoint Dependence Graph, the elimination rules for different kinds of checkpoints are discussed, and the algorithms for the same cluster checkpoints, different cluster checkpoints, and rollback recovery are also given. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed hybrid checkpointing strategy is a preferable trade-off method, which not only synthetically takes all kinds of resource constraints of Ad hoc networks into account, but also outperforms the existing schemes in terms of the dependence to cluster heads, the recovery time compared to the pure synchronous, and the pure asynchronous checkpoint advantage. © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland