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On the Quality of Service of Failure Detectors
May 2002 (vol. 51 no. 5)
pp. 561-580
ASCII Text
x 
 
W. Chen, S. Toueg, M.K. Aguilera, "On the Quality of Service of Failure Detectors," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 561-580, May, 2002.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TC.2002.1004595,
author = {W. Chen and S. Toueg and M.K. Aguilera},
title = {On the Quality of Service of Failure Detectors},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Computers},
volume = {51},
number = {5},
issn = {0018-9340},
year = {2002},
pages = {561-580},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TC.2002.1004595},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computers
TI - On the Quality of Service of Failure Detectors
IS - 5
SN - 0018-9340
SP561
EP580
EPD - 561-580
A1 - W. Chen,
A1 - S. Toueg,
A1 - M.K. Aguilera,
PY - 2002
KW - Failure detectors
KW - quality of service
KW - fault tolerance
KW - distributed algorithm
KW - probabilistic analysis
VL - 51
JA - IEEE Transactions on Computers
ER -
 

We study the quality of service (QoS) of failure detectors. By QoS, we mean a specification that quantifies 1) how fast the failure detector detects actual failures and 2) how well it avoids false detections. We first propose a set of QoS metrics to specify failure detectors for systems with probabilistic behaviors, i.e., for systems where message delays and message losses follow some probability distributions. We then give a new failure detector algorithm and analyze its QoS in terms of the proposed metrics. We show that, among a large class of failure detectors, the new algorithm is optimal with respect to some of these QoS metrics. Given a set of failure detector QoS requirements, we show how to compute the parameters of our algorithm so that it satisfies these requirements and we show how this can be done even if the probabilistic behavior of the system is not known. We then present some simulation results that show that the new failure detector algorithm provides a better QoS than an algorithm that is commonly used in practice. Finally, we suggest some ways to make our failure detector adaptive to changes in the probabilistic behavior of the network.

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Index Terms:
Failure detectors, quality of service, fault tolerance, distributed algorithm, probabilistic analysis
Citation:
W. Chen, S. Toueg, M.K. Aguilera, "On the Quality of Service of Failure Detectors," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 561-580, May 2002, doi:10.1109/TC.2002.1004595
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