Building reliable mobile-aware applications using the Rover toolkit

Abstract

This paper discusses extensions to the Rover toolkit for constructing reliable mobile-aware applications. The extensions improve upon the existing failure model, which addressed client or communication failures and guaranteed reliable message delivery from clients to server, but did not address server failures (e.g., the loss of an incoming message due to server failure) [16]. Due to the unpredictable, intermittent communication connectivity typically found in mobile client environments, it is inappropriate to make clients responsible for guaranteeing request completion at servers. The extensions discussed in this paper provide both system- and language-level support for reliable operation in the form of stable logging of each message received by a server, per-application stable variables, programmer-supplied failure recovery procedures, server process failure detection, and automatic server process restart. The design and implementation of fault-tolerance support is optimized for high...