Distributed Snapshots : New Approach for Mobile Computing

Distributed snapshots are an important building block for distributed systems, and are useful for constructing efficient check pointing protocols, among other uses. Direct application of these algorithms to mobile systems is not feasible, however, due to differences in the environment in which mobile systems operate, relative to general distributed systems. This paper presents a distributed snapshot that is well-suited to mobile systems, which often have limited bandwidth and long latencies, and where the mobile hosts may roam among the different cells within the system. In addition to presenting the protocol itself, we prove its liveness and safety. As was the case for the classical distributed snapshots protocol and distributed systems, we believe that this protocol will be an important building block for mobile systems.