5/2005 : Failure Detection with Booting in Partially Synchronous Systems

RR Number

5/2005

Conference

Fifth European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-5)

Author(s)

Josef Widder, G�rard Le Lann, Ulrich Schmid

Abstract

Unreliable failure detectors are a well known means to enrich asynchronous distributed systems with time-free semantics that allow to solve consensus in the presence of crash failures. Implementing unreliable failure detectors requires a system that provides some synchrony, typically an upper bound on end-to-end message delays. Recently, we introduced an implementation of the perfect failure detector in a novel partially synchronous model, referred to as the Model, where only the ratio Theta of maximum vs. minimum end-to-end delay of messages that are simultaneously in transit must be known a priori (while the actual delays need not be known and not even be bounded). In this paper, we present an alternative failure detector algorithm, which is based on a clock synchronization algorithm for the Model. It not only surpasses our first implementation with respect to failure detection time, but also works during the system booting phase.

Bibtex

@article{ widder:2005-5,
  author =       "Josef Widder and Gérard Le Lann and Ulrich Schmid",
  title =        "Failure Detection with Booting in Partially Synchronous Systems",
  journal =      "Fifth European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-5)",
  year =         "2005",
  month =        "Apr."
}

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