Distributed domino effect-free checkpointing techniques can be divided into two categories: coordinated and communication-induced checkpointing. The former is inappropriate for mobile computing systems because it either forces every mobile host to take a new checkpoint or blocks the underlying computation during the checkpointing process. The latter makes every mobile host take the checkpoint independently. However, each mobile host may need to store multiple local checkpoints in stable storage. This investigation presents a novel three level synchronous checkpointing algorithm that combines the advantages of above two methods for mobile computing systems. The algorithm utilizes pre-synchronization, quasi-synchronization, and post-synchronization techniques and has the following merits: (1) Consistent global checkpoints can be ensured. (2) No mobile host is blocked during checkpointing. (3) Only twice the checkpoint size is required. (4) Power consumption is low. (5) The disconnection problem of mobile hosts can be resolved. (6) Very few mobile hosts in doze mode are disturbed. (7) It is simple and easy to implement. The proposed algorithm's numerical results are also provided in this work for comparison. The comparison reveals that our algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of checkpoint overhead, maintained checkpoints, power consumption, and disturbed mobile hosts.

One major breakthrough on the communication society recently is the extension of networking from wired to wireless networks. This has made possible creating a mobile distributed computing environment and has brought us several new challenges in distributed protocol design. Obviously, wireless networks do have some fundamental differences from wired networks that need to be paid special attention of, such as lower communication bandwidth compared to wired networks, limited electrical power due to battery capacity, and mobility of processes. These new issues make traditional recovery algorithm unsuitable. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm with O(nr) message complexity where O(nr) is the total number of mobile hosts (MHs) related to the failed MH. In addition, these MHs only need to rollback once and can immediately resume its operation without waiting for any coordination message from other MHs. During normal operation, the application message needs O(1) additional information when it transmitted between MHs and mobile support stations (MSSs). Each MSS must keep an ntotal_h*n cell_h dependency matrix, where O(ntotal_h) is the total number of MHs in the system and ncell_h is the total number of MHs in its cell. Finally, one related issue of resending lost messages is also considered.