Virtually-Synchronous Communication Based on a Weak Failure Suspector

Abstract

Failure detectors (or, more accurately Failure Suspectors - FS) appear to be a fundamental service upon which to build fault-tolerant, distributed applications. This paper shows that a FS with very weak semantics (i.e. that delivers failure and recovery information in no specific order) suffices to implement virtually-synchronous communication (VSC) in an asynchronous system subject to process crash failures and network partitions. The VSC paradigm is particularly useful in asynchronous systems and greatly simplifies building fault-tolerant applications that mask failures by replicating processes. We suggest a three-component architecture to implement virtually-synchronous communication: (1) at the lowest level, the FS component; on top of it, (2a) a component that defines new views, and (2b) a component that reliably multicasts messages within a view. The issues covered in this paper also lead to a better understanding of the various membership service semantics proposed in recent literature.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 28, 1993
Accession Number
ADA264352

Entities

People

  • Aleta Ricciardi
  • Andre Schiper

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Agreements
  • Algorithms
  • Asynchronous Systems
  • Classification
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Damage Detection
  • Guarantees
  • Operating Systems
  • Recovery
  • Semantics
  • Sequences
  • Switches
  • Switching
  • Topology

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development