MIGSOCK

Process migration is the act of transferring a process between two machines during the execution of that process. Although it has not achieved widespread use, with the growth of distributed computing, socket migration is gaining importance.

This project identifies the shortcoming of current process migration approaches: the lack of network socket migration support at the operating system level. A network socket is the interface provided by the OS to a user program that abstracts-away the complexities involved in network communications. A socket is represented in a process by a socket descriptor. Comprehensive process migration systems should include this socket descriptor as part of the proecess that migrates. Otherwise, the candidates for process migration are limited to processes that do not have network connections.

MIGSOCK is a solution to the problem of socket migration. MIGSOCK provides a Linux kernel module that re-implements TCP to make migration possible.