Towards Persistent Connections Using Failure Detectors

In the application layer, communication between two nodes is usually done on a communication channel. On the other hand, connection and disconnection occur intermittently in lower layers. Persistent connection is often required by several applications (e.g., HTTP, large data transfer, etc.). It has to be available continuously till the application closes it explicitly. To realize such a persistent connection, transient link failure has to be masked from the application layer. In this paper, we propose a way to provide persistent connections in TCP using accrual failure detector. Once the connection is established, the session layer can properly handle link failures, for example, it can suspend while link failure or unstable link condition, and resume after the recovery of the link. To realize persistent connections, we first implemented an interrogation-based accrual failure detector and evaluated its performance in several environments. Then, proposed the procedure for persistent connections using the failure detector.