Consistency of global checkpoints based on characteristics of communication events in multimedia applications

摘要

In order to achieve fault-tolerant distributed systems, checkpoint-recovery has been researched and many protocols have been designed. A global checkpoint taken by the protocols have to be consistent. For conventional data communication networks, a global checkpoint is defined to be consistent if there is no inconsistent message in any communication channel. For multimedia communication networks, there are different requirements for time-constrained failure-free execution and large-size message transmissions where lost of a part of the message is acceptable. In addition, based on not characteristics of data of a message but characteristics of communication events for the message, restrictions of a consistent global checkpoint are determined. This reflects deterministic and non-deterministic property of the usage of communication buffers in layered system model. This paper proposes novel criteria, for global checkpoints in multimedia communication networks.