Asynchronous failure detectors

Failure detectors — oracles that provide information about process crashes — are an important ion for crash tolerance in distributed systems. Although current failure-detector theory provides great generality and expressiveness, it also poses significant challenges in developing a robust hierarchy of failure detectors. We address some of these challenges by proposing a variant of failure detectors called asynchronous failure detectors and an associated modeling framework. Unlike the traditional failure-detector framework, our framework eschews real time completely. We show that asynchronous failure detectors are sufficiently expressive to include several popular failure detectors. Additionally, we show that asynchronous failure detectors satisfy many desirable properties: they are self-implementable, guarantee that stronger asynchronous failure detectors solve more problems, and ensure that their outputs encode no information other than process crashes. We introduce the notion o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: PODC
• Authors: Alejandro Cornejo, Nancy A. Lynch, Srikanth Sastry
• Keywords: Desirable Properties, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Failure Detector, Failure Detectors, PODC 2012