Experimental responsiveness evaluation of decentralized service discovery

Abstract

Service discovery is a fundamental concept in service networks. It provides networks with the capability to publish, browse and locate service instances. Service discovery is thus the precondition for a service network to operate correctly and for the services to be available. In the last decade, decentralized service discovery mechanisms have become increasingly popular. Especially in ad-hoc scenarios -such as ad-hoc wireless networks -they are an integral part of auto-configuring service networks. Albeit the fact that auto-configuring networks are increasingly used in application domains where dependability is a major issue, these environments are inherently unreliable. In this paper, we examine the dependability of decentralized service discovery. We simulate service networks that are automatically configured by Zeroconf technologies. Since discovery is a timecritical operation, we evaluate responsiveness -the probability to perform some action on time even in the presence of faults -of domain name system (DNS) based service discovery under influence of packet loss. We show that responsiveness decreases significantly already with moderate packet loss and becomes practicably unacceptable with higher packet loss.

TROBADOR: Service Discovery for Distributed Community Network Micro-Clouds

“…Also it shows the number of services discovered at each hop. In terms of examining the dependability aspects of decentralized service discovery concepts in unreliable networks, Dittrich's and Salfner's paper [14] is the most relevant to our work. The authors evaluate the responsiveness of domain name system (DNS) based service discovery under influence of packet loss and with up to 50 service instances.…”

Modeling Responsiveness of Decentralized Service Discovery in Wireless Mesh Networks

“…They did not consider active SD responsiveness during regular operation. Furthermore, the widespread Zeroconf protocol is not considered, the responsiveness of which has been evaluated in experiments in [10]. The paper at hand aims to provide analytical methods to reproduce the results in [10].…”

ExCovery -- A Framework for Distributed System Experiments and a Case Study of Service Discovery

“…As a time-critical operation, one key property of SD is responsiveness -the probability that a number of SMs is found within a deadline, as required by the application calling SD. ExCovery was originally developed to support and validate research on SD responsiveness, as in [1], [2]. Due to space constraints, this work covers the abstract description of these experiments, their results will be published in future work.…”