An Efficient Fault Tolerance Protocols for Mobile Computing Systems

Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to perform its function correctly even in the presence of internal faults. The purpose of fault tolerance is to increase the dependability of a system. A complimentary but separate approach to increasing dependability is fault prevention. This consists of techniques, such as inspection, whose intent is to eliminate the circumstances by which faults arise. Faults can be classified as transient or permanent. A transient fault will eventually disappear without any apparent intervention, whereas a permanent one will remain unless it is removed by some external agency. While it may seem that permanent faults are more severe, from an engineering perspective they are much easier to diagnose and handle. The intermittent transient faults that recur often unpredictably are the most problematic. Nowadays, mobile computing is a new software paradigm that is of prime interest in the Information Technology research community. This paper looks at various fault tolerance protocols and issues applicable to mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). A Mobile computing system is a distributed system where some of node