Message logging in mobile computing

Dependable mobile computing is enhanced by independent recovery, low power consumption and no dependence on stable storage at the mobile host. Existing recovery protocols proposed for mobile environments typically create consistent global checkpoints that do not guarantee independent recovery and low power consumption. This paper demonstrates the advantages of message logging by describing a receiver based logging protocol. Checkpointing is utilized to limit log size and recovery latency. We compare the performance of our approach with that of existing mobile checkpointing and recovery algorithms in terms of failure free overhead and recovery time. We also describe a stable storage management scheme for mobile support stations. Garbage collection is achieved without direct participation of mobile hosts.