Title :
Probabilistic analysis of a group failure detection protocol
Author :
Bollo, Roger ; Le Narzul, Jean-Pierre ; Raynal, Michel ; Tronel, Frédéric
Author_Institution :
IRISA, Rennes, France
Abstract :
A group membership failure (in short, a group failure) occurs when one of the group members crashes. A group failure detection protocol has to inform all the non-crashed members of the group that this group entity has crashed. Ideally, such a protocol should be live (if a process crashes, then the group failure has to be detected) and safe (if a group failure is claimed, then at least one process has crashed). Unreliable asynchronous distributed systems are characterized by the impossibility for a process to get an accurate view of the system state. Consequently, the design of a group failure detection protocol that is both safe and live is a problem that cannot be solved in all runs of an asynchronous distributed system. We analyse a group failure detection protocol whose design naturally ensures its liveness. We show that by tuning appropriately some of its duration-related parameters, the safety property can be guaranteed with a probability as close to 1 as desired. This analysis shows that, in real distributed systems, it is possible to achieve failure detection with a negligible probability of wrong suspicions
Keywords :
distributed processing; probability; protocols; software reliability; duration-related parameters; group failure detection protocol; group membership failure; liveness; probabilistic analysis; safety property; tuning; unreliable asynchronous distributed systems; Distributed computing;
Conference_Titel :
Object-Oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems, 1999. Proceedings. Fourth International Workshop on
Conference_Location :
Santa Barbara, CA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-5579-2
DOI :
10.1109/WORDS.1999.806574