Storage Tradeoffs in a Collaborative Backup Service for Mobile Devices

Ludovic Courtès (1) , Marc-Olivier Killijian (1) , David Powell (1)

1 LAAS-TSF - Équipe Tolérance aux fautes et Sûreté de Fonctionnement informatique

Mobile devices are increasingly relied on but are used in contexts that put them at risk of physical damage, loss or theft. We consider a fault-tolerance approach that exploits spontaneous interactions to implement a collaborative backup service. We define the constraints implied by the mobile environment, analyze how they translate into the storage layer of such a backup system and examine various design options. The paper concludes with a presentation of our prototype implementation of the storage layer, an evaluation of the impact of several compression methods, and directions for future work.

Keywords: mobile computing; nomadic computing; data backup; peer-to-peer; fault-tolerance; dependability

Domains: Computer science; Mobile Computing; Ubiquitous Computing

Ludovic Courtès, Marc-Olivier Killijian, David Powell. Storage Tradeoffs in a Collaborative Backup Service for Mobile Devices. 2006. ⟨hal-00187069⟩