Checkpointing and Rollback Recovery Algorithms for Fault Tolerance in MANETs: A Review

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are emerging as a major technology in mobile computing. A MANET is a collection of mobile devices or nodes that communicate with each other using wireless links without availability of any static infrastructure or centralized control. A node in such a network should be fault tolerable and failure free execution of processes on the network nodes is vital. In order to make devices fault tolerant checkpoint based recovery technique can be used. Checkpointing is a technique that can be used to make device or node fault tolerant and reduce the recovery time in case of failure. It takes the snapshot of current application state of process and stores it in some memory area and then using it to resume the computation from current checkpoint instead of resuming it from the beginning. Some limitations of MANETs such as mobility, dynamic topology, limited bandwidth of channel, limited storage space and power restrictions makes checkpointing as a major challenge in mobile ad hoc networks. This paper presents the survey of some existing algorithms, which have been proposed for making MANETs fault tolerant and implementing or deploying checkpointing in mobile ad hoc network.