Resumen
Mobile computing enables users to access and exchange information while they travel, roam in their home environments, or work at clients' sites. Mobile hosts have a variety of computational and networking capabilities. Portable computers already provide computational power comparable to that of fixed hosts. Wireless networking is useful in environments where hard-wired networks are not feasible or economically rewarding. Currently several vendors are selling hardware support for wireless communication, using technologies such as infrared transmitters and cellular telephone systems. The diversity and flexibility introduced by mobile computing bring new challenges to the area of fault tolerance. Types of failures that were rare in fixed environments are common with mobile hosts. This article proposes a new coordinated checkpoint protocol for distributed systems. This protocol was designed to take into consideration the special characteristics of mobile environments. The protocol is able to store recoverable consistent states of the application without having to exchange messages.