Providing Efficient Redundancy to an Evacuation Support System Using Remote Procedure Calls

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of micro-server technology and mobile agent technology in order to migrate a database server when the server machine has a problem and unable to support the database server. We have engaged in an evacuation support system. The previous system had a single point of failure: if one of the server machines failed, the entire system failed. In order to mitigate this problem, Zabbix system monitoring software triggered the server software to migrate to a spare server machine as a mobile agent. This achieves system redundancy without any cloud technology. Zabbix, however, takes five minutes to detect a system failure. Users of the evacuation support system, who are in a hurry to go to evacuation shelters, need real-time information about evacuation routes. They need a good recommender system to move toward safe places. For systems that need to provide real-time information, it is a serious problem that the system needs five minutes to detect a system failure. Therefore, this paper proposes a new surveillance system, which employs the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) instead of Zabbix. In the proposed system, the mobile agent is used to make a database server migrate to another server machine quickly and recover the evacuation support system. This paper describes the design and implementation of our server agents and reports the experiences and observations during the experiments.