Local Checkpointing for Embedded Java Applications

Enabling the execution of Java applications on personal embedded devices could bring great benefits to their users. For example, you could exchange your calendar application with your neighbor, or send your favorite telephone game to your friends without thinking if they have a compatible phone. Moreover, these devices will have to provide a reliable execution environment as soon as they will be implied in critical or distributed applications. Checkpoints capture/rollback recovery solves a part of this problem. This paper presents the integration of a checkpoint mech­anism in our own embedded Java Virtual Machine named Scratchy. Our mechanism, is transparent for the user and has a low overhead on the applications. We propose one global and two incremental methods which are evaluated and compared each other. This mechanism can be used with the midlets which are the standard Java applications for cell phones and PDAs. We present two series of evaluations, the first is done with a benchmark and the second with real applications. We show that the incremental methods give shorter capture times than the global method, under certain conditions