Towards building a fault tolerant and conflict-free distributed file system for mobile clients

Abstract

The rising demand for mobile computing has created a need for improved file systems that support mobile clients. Current file systems with support for mobility provide availability through file replicas that are cached at the client side. However, mobile clients may experience different obstacles in regard to the local cache, such as the intermittent connection, and serious conflicts when synchronizing back to the server. In this thesis, we present a comprehensive classification of distributed and mobile file systems, and propose a novel distributed file system model for mobile clients with cacheless wireless devices. We discuss the implementation of our model, investigate its high availability functions and report on its performance evaluation using a cluster of workstations as a test-bed. Our test run results indicate clearly that our technique exhibits a significant degree of automation and conflict-free mobile file system. Last but not least, we have proposed a novel scheme based on the FBR scheme and file pre-fetching to enhance the server-side caching strategy of our distributed file system. We present our scheme and discuss its evaluation performance using an extensive set of experiments.