Designing a service of failure detection in asynchronous distributed systems

Even though introduced for solving the consensus problem in asynchronous distributed systems, the notion of unreliable failure detector can be used as a powerful tool for any distributed protocol in order to get better performance by allowing the usage of aggressive time-outs to detect failures of entities executing the protocol. We present the design of a Failure Detection Service (FDS) based on the notion of unreliable failure detectors introduced by T. Chandra and S. Toueg (1996). FDS is able to detect crashed objects and entities that permanently omit to send messages without imposing changes to the source code of the underlying protocols that use this service. Also, FDS provides an object oriented interface to its subscribers and, more important, it does not add network overhead if no entity subscribes to the service. The paper can be also seen as a first step towards a distributed implementation of a heartbeat-based failure management system as defined in fault-tolerant CORBA specification