Recoverable Mobile Environment: Design and Trade-Off Analysis

The mobile wireless environment poses challenging problems in designing fault tolerant systems because of the dynamics of mobility and limited bandwidth available on wireless links Traditional fault tolerance schemes therefore cannot be directly applied to these systems Mobile systems are often subject to environ mental conditions which can cause loss of communica tions or data Because of the consumer orientation of most mobile systems run time faults must be corrected with minimal if any intervention from the user The fault tolerance capability must therefore be transpar ent to the user Presented here are schemes for recovery upon a fail ure of a mobile host This paper portrays the limita tions of the mobile wireless environment and their im pact on recovery protocols Toward this adaptation of well known recovery schemes are presented which suit the mobile environment The performance of these schemes has been analyzed to determine those envi ronments where a particular recovery scheme is best suited The performance of the recovery schemes pri marily depends on i the wireless bandwidth ii the communication mobility ratio of the user and iii the failure rate of the mobile host