A State Transfer Method That Adapts to Network Bandwidth Variations in Geographic State Machine Replication

Abstract

We present a new state transfer method for geographic State Machine Replication (SMR) that dynamically allocates the state to be transferred among replicas according to changes in communication bandwidths. SMR is a method that improves fault tolerance by replicating a service to multiple replicas. When a replica is newly added or is recovered from a failure, the other replicas transfer the current state of the service to it. However, in geographic SMR, the communication bandwidths of replicas are different and constantly changing. Therefore, existing state transfer methods cannot fully utilize the available bandwidth, and their state transfer time becomes long. To overcome this problem, our method divides the state into multiple chunks and assigns them to replicas based on each replica's bandwidth so that the broader a replica's bandwidth is, the more chunks it transfers. The number of assigned chunks is dynamically updated based on the currently estimated bandwidth. The performance evaluation on Amazon EC2 shows that the proposed method reduces the state transfer time by up to 47% compared with the existing one.