Failure Detection Sequencers: Necessary and Sufficient Information about Failures to Solve Predicate Detection

Gärtner, Felix; Pleisch, Stefan

doi:10.1007/3-540-36108-1_19

Cited by 9 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…In this paper, we study algorithms that use devices similar to failure detectors. However, our definition of computation will be slightly different [Gärtner and Pleisch 2002], but equivalent to that of Chandra and Toueg [1996]. We define two functions: a step function A s from τ to the set of all algorithm steps, and a process function A p from τ to Π.…”

Section: Algorithms and Computationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neighborhood View Consistency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Jhumka

Mottola

2016

ACM Trans. Sen. Netw.

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Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are characterized by localized interactions, that is, protocols are often based on message exchanges within a node's direct radio range. We recognize that for these protocols to work effectively, nodes must have consistent information about their shared neighborhoods. Different types of faults, however, can affect this information, severely impacting a protocol's performance. We factor this problem out of existing WSN protocols and argue that a notion of neighborhood view consistency (NVC) can be embedded within existing designs to improve their performance. To this end, we study the problem from both a theoretical and a system perspective. We prove that the problem cannot be solved in an asynchronous system using any of Chandra and Toueg's failure detectors. Because of this, we introduce a new software device called pseudocrash failure detector (PCD), study its properties, and identify necessary and sufficient conditions for solving NVC with PCDs. We prove that, in the presence of transient faults, NVC is impossible to solve with any PCDs, and thus define two weaker specifications of the problem. We develop a global algorithm that satisfies both specifications in the presence of unidirectional links, and a localized algorithm that solves the weakest specification in networks of bidirectional links. We implement the latter atop two different WSN operating systems, integrate our implementations with four different WSN protocols, and run extensive micro-benchmarks and full-stack experiments on a real 90-node WSN testbed. Our results show that the performance significantly improves for NVC-equipped protocols; for example, the Collection Tree Protocol (CTP) halves energy consumption with higher data delivery.

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Section: Algorithms and Computationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gärtner and Pleisch [2002] show that failure detectors are inadequate to solve the global predicate detection problem in the presence of crash failures. The authors then introduce a stronger device, called a failure detector sequencer, which provides sufficient information to solve global predicate detection.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neighborhood View Consistency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Jhumka

Mottola

2016

ACM Trans. Sen. Netw.

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“…In this sense, a failure detector does not really encapsulate all the synchrony of a system. Gärtner and Pleisch [2002] explored an extension of the original failure detector model and managed to specify a device similar to a failure detector that allows · 15 to fully emulate a synchronous system. This device works like a perfect failure detector, only that -upon suspecting a process -the device returns a dump of the state in which that process crashed.…”

Section: 31mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The precise formulation of this device is not a function only of failures anymore, but rather a function of the process state and the failures in the system. Gärtner and Pleisch [2002] proved that such a device allows to embed crash events perfectly into the causal history of a computation. So any problem can be computed that depends on the causal structure of a computation.…”

Section: 31mentioning

confidence: 99%

The failure detector abstraction

2011

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A failure detector is a fundamental abstraction in distributed computing. This paper surveys this abstraction through two dimensions. First we study failure detectors as building blocks to simplify the design of reliable distributed algorithms. In particular, we illustrate how failure detectors can factor out timing assumptions to detect failures in distributed agreement algorithms. Second, we study failure detectors as computability benchmarks. That is, we survey the weakest failure detector question and illustrate how failure detectors can be used to classify problems. We also highlight some limitations of the failure detector abstraction along each of the dimensions.

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“…Finding out whether an incoming channel from a crashed process is empty requires some form of synchrony. Charron-Bost et al [7,16] prove that, in an asynchronous crash-prone distributed system, it is impossible to reliably detect whether there still exists a message in transit on an incoming channel from a crashed process with any form of failure detector, even a perfect one. Intuitively, this is because a failure detector in the formal sense of Chandra and Toueg [3] is defined as a function of process failures, that is, a function of operational states of processes.…”

Section: The Weakest Failure Detector For Termination Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On termination detection in crash-prone distributed systems with failure detectors

Mittal

Freiling

Venkatesan

et al. 2008

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

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We investigate the problem of detecting termination of a distributed computation in systems where processes can fail by crashing. Specifically, when the communication topology is fully connected, we describe a way to transform any termination detection algorithm A that has been designed for a failure-free environment into a termination detection algorithm B that can tolerate process crashes. Our transformation assumes the existence of a perfect failure detector. We show that a perfect failure detector is in fact necessary to solve the termination detection problem in a crash-prone distributed system even if at most one process can crash.Let µ(n, M) and δ(n, M) denote the message complexity and detection latency, respectively, of A when the system has n processes and the underlying computation exchanges M application messages. The message complexity of B is O(n + µ(n, 0)) messages per failure more than the message complexity of A. Also, its detection latency is O(δ(n, 0)) per failure more than that of A. Furthermore, application message size increases by at most log( f + 1) bits, where f is the actual number of processes that fail during an execution. We show that, when the communication topology is fully connected, under certain realistic assumption, any fault-tolerant termination detection algorithm can be forced to exchange Ω (n f ) control messages in the worst-case even when at most one process may be active initially and the underlying computation does not exchange any application messages. This implies that our transformation is optimal in terms of message complexity when µ(n, 0) = O(n).The fault-tolerant termination detection algorithm resulting from the transformation satisfies three desirable properties. First, it can tolerate the failure of up to n − 1 processes. Second, it does not impose any overhead on the fault-sensitive termination detection algorithm until one or more processes crash. Third, it does not block the application at any time. Further, using our transformation, we derive a fault-tolerant termination detection algorithm that is the most efficient fault-tolerant termination detection algorithm that has been proposed so far to our knowledge. Our transformation can be extended to arbitrary communication topologies provided process crashes do not partition the system.

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Failure Detection Sequencers: Necessary and Sufficient Information about Failures to Solve Predicate Detection

Cited by 9 publications

References 14 publications

Neighborhood View Consistency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighborhood View Consistency in Wireless Sensor Networks

The failure detector abstraction

On termination detection in crash-prone distributed systems with failure detectors

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