AVCast : New Approaches For Implementing Availability-Dependent Reliability for Multicast Receivers

Today’s large-scale distributed systems consist of collections of nodes that have highly variable availability — a phenomenon sometimes called churn. This availability variation is often a hindrance to achieving reliability and performance for distributed applications such as multicast. This paper looks into utilizing and leveraging availability information in order to provide availability-dependent message reliability for multicast receivers. An application (e.g., a publish-subscribe system) may want to scale the multicast message reliability at each receiver according to that receiver’s availability (in terms of the fraction of time that receiver is online) — different options are that the reliability is independent of the availability, or proportional to it.. We propose several gossip-based algorithms to support several such predicates. These techniques rely on each node’s availability being monitored in a distributed manner by a small group of other nodes in such a way t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SRDS
• Authors: Thadpong Pongthawornkamol, Indranil Gupta
• Keywords: Availability, Distributed Systems, Message Reliability, SRDS 2006