Distributed Dynamic Failure Detection

Abstract

Failure monitoring and detection phase is a critical part in providing a scalability, reliability and high availability in current distributed environment. Heartbeat style of interaction is a widely used technique. This technique is utilized for detecting a fault where it monitors the heartbeats of system resources continuously in a very short interval. However, this approach has its limitations as it requires a period of time to detect the faulty node, causing delay in the impending recovery procedures. This paper presents a fault detection mechanism and service using hybrid heartbeat mechanism and dynamic estimated time of arrival (ETA) for each heartbeat message. This technique introduces the use of index server for indexing the transaction and operates dynamic hybrid heartbeat mechanism and pinging procedure for fault detection. The evaluation outcome signifies the use of the hybrid heartbeat mechanism in reducing approximately 30% of the time taken to detect faults compared to existing techniques and provides a basis for a customizable recovery action to take place.