End-to-End WAN Service Availability

Abstract--This paper seeks to understand how network failures affect the availability of service delivery across wide-area networks (WANs) and to evaluate classes of techniques for improving end-to-end service availability. Using several large-scale connectivity traces, we develop a model of network unavailability that includes key parameters such as failure location and failure duration. We then use trace-based simulation to evaluate several classes of techniques for coping with network unavailability. We find that caching alone is seldom effective at insulating services from failures but that the combination of mobile extension code and prefetching can improve average unavailability by as much as an order of magnitude for classes of service whose semantics support disconnected operation. We find that routing-based techniques may provide significant improvements but that the improvements of many individual techniques are limited because they do not address all significant categories o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: USITS
• Authors: Bharat Chandra, Michael Dahlin, Lei Gao, Amol Nayate
• Keywords: Average Unavailability, Network Failures, Network Unavailability, Operating System, USITS 2001