JAIST Repository
https://dspace.jaist.ac.jp/Title

Progress Report in 2007 : Research on Adaptive
Failure Detector

Author(s)Xiong, Naixue

CitationIssue Date

2008‑03‑04

TypeConference Paper

Text version

publisher

URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10119/8243

RightsDescription

JAIST 21世紀COEシンポジウム2008「検証進化可能電子社会」= JAIST 21st Century COE Symposium 2008
Verifiable and Evolvable e‑Society, 開催：2008年
3月3日〜4日, 開催場所：北陸先端科学技術大学院大学, GRP研究員発表会 セッションC‑2発表資料

Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Progress Report in 2007---- Research on Adaptive Failure Detector
Ph.D Candidate: Naixue Xiong; Number: 520008
School of Information Science
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

naixue@jaist.ac.jp
1. Introduction of our research
Fault-tolerant distributed systems are designed to provide reliable and continuous service
despite the failure of (one or more faults within) some of its components. In such systems,
failure detector is a basic block and also is at the core of many fault-tolerant algorithms andapplications. It can be found in many systems, such as ISIS, Ensemble, Relacs, Transis, Air
Traffic Control Systems. Fault-tolerant systems are designed to provide reliable andcontinuous services for distributed systems despite the failures of some of their components[1-3]. As an essential building block for fault-tolerant systems, failure detector (FD) plays acentral role in the engineering of such dependable systems. Therefore, ensuring quality ofservice of failure detector is very significant for ensuring fault tolerance of distributedsystems.
I present two novel failure detectors: Exponential distribution failure detector (ED FD)
and Self-tuning failure detector (SFD) and analyze their implements. For ED FD, it is anoptimization over existed methods. In ED FD, Exponential Distribution, instead of NormalDistribution in [4-5], is used for estimation of the distribution for inter-arrival time.
Experimental results demonstrated that ED FD over-performs the existed methods from theview of quality of service of failure detector. So far, a lot of failure detectors are designed totry to satisfy different QoS requirements. However, there are no any self-tuning scheme
presented. That is, for a given QoS requirement, how do the parameters of failure detectors
are tuned by itself to satisfy such requirement? Therefore, in this thesis we address thisproblem and present a self-tuned failure detector.
Furthermore, the kappa failure detector [6] is an instance of accrual failure detector [5].
This allows for a clearer separation between the monitoring of the system and theinterpretation of suspicion information by applications. Hayashibara in [6] gave the originalidea and definitions about the kappa FD. While the performance evaluation and analysis is notenough. Therefore, a question then arise: what is the performance characteristic of kappa FD
compared with the existed failure detectors? In this thesis, we analyze quality of service of
kappa failure detector based on a lot of experiments.

2. Future work
In future work, we would like to explore the QoS scalability, as interference from heavier
network traffic (e.g., a scenario where most of the nodes in the networked system have activeFDs), to see whether that will affect detection accuracy, detection time, etc. Also, we would

explore their properties and relation in software engineering applications, then propose areasonable FD in fault-tolerant distributed system, and apply the proposed FD into an actual
fault-tolerant distributed system, specially, we are very interested in designing an self-tuning
failure detector (SFD) in actual fault-tolerant distributed system. For all the proposed failure
detectors so far, the common point of them is that they all can detect the directly connectedprocesses. While, for some processes that are not directly connected, i.e., they only cancommunicate each other by some middle processes, all failure detectors are not applicable.
Therefore, an open question arises: how to design an indirect failure detector to make sureany two processes, even they are not connected directly, can detect each other effectively.
Furthermore, we also would like to explore in the following aspects.
(1) New schemes based on different architectures of failure detection;(2) Build a pragmatic platform on failure detection;(3) Application of failure detections in Ad hoc, Mobile network, or other environment;

3. Publications in 2007
[1] Naixue Xiong, Yan Yang, Xavier Defago, “Comparative Analysis of QoS and Memory
Usage of Adaptive Failure Detectors,” The 13th IEEE Pacific Rim International
Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC'07), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia,December 17-19, 2007, accepted for long paper.
[2] Naixue Xiong, Xavier Defago, “ED FD: Improving the Phi Accrual Failure Detector,”
Technical report, IS-RR-2007-007, JAIST, Japan, Apr. 27, 2007.
[3] Xavier Defago, Naixue Xiong, Y. Yang, and N. Hayashibara, “Pragmatic Accrual Failure
Detection with Kappa-FD,” Technical report, JAIST, Japan, November 2007.

4. References[1] I. Gupta, T. D. Chandra, G. S. Goldszmidt. On scalable and efficient distributed failure
detectors. In Proc. 20th ACM symp. on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 170 179, Newport, Rhode Island, United States, Aug. 2001.
[2] C. Delporte-Gallet, H. Fauconnier, R. Guerraoui. A realistic look at failure detectors. InProc. Intl. Conf. on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'02), pages 345- 353,
Washington DC, Jun. 2002.
[3] M. J. Fischer, N. A. Lynch, and M. D. Paterson. Impossibility of distributed consensus
with one faulty process. Journal of ACM, 32(2): 374-382, Apr. 1985.
[4] N. Hayashibara, X. Defago, R. Yared, and T. Katayama. The phi accrual failuredetector. In Proc. 23rd IEEE Intl. Symp. on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'04),
pages 66-78, Florianpolis, Brazil, Oct. 2004.
[5] X. Defago, P. Urban, N. Hayashibara, T. Katayama. De_nition and speci_cation of accrual
failure detectors. In Proc. Intl. Conf. on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'05),
pages 206 - 215, Yokohama, Japan, Jun. 2005.
[6] N. Hayashibara. Accrual failure detectors. Doctoral thesis, Japan Advanced Institute ofScience and Technology, June, 2004.