On the quality of service of failure detectors based on control theory

Abstract

The detection of failures is a fundamental issue for fault tolerance in distributed systems. Recently, many people have come to realize that failure detection ought to be provided as some form of generic service, similar to IP address lookup. However, this has not been successful so far; one of the reasons being the fact that classical failure detectors were not designed to satisfy several application requirements simultaneously. More specifically, traditional implementations of failure detectors are often tuned for running over local networks and fail to address some important problems found in wide-area distributed systems with a large number of monitored components. In this paper, we study the quality of service (QoS) of failure detectors. We first present a novel failure detector scheme combined with control theory that can help in solving or optimizing some problems. Furthermore, this paper discusses the design and analysis of implementing a scalable failure detection service for such large wide-area distributed systems considering dynamically adjusting the heartbeat streams, so that it satisfies the bottleneck router requirements. We further show how the online failure detector control algorithm can be used to design a controller, analyze the theoretical aspects of the proposed algorithm and verify its agreement. Simulation results show the efficiency of our scheme in terms of high utilization of the bottleneck link, fast response and good stability of the bottleneck router buffer occupancy as well as of the controlled sending rates. In conclusion, the new failure detector algorithm provides a better QoS.