Heartbeat: A Timeout-Free Failure Detector for Quiescent Reliable Communication

Abstract. We study the problem of achieving reliable communication with quiescent algorithms (i.e., algorithms that eventually stop sending messages) in asynchronous systems with process crashes and lossy links. We first show that it is impossible to solve this problem without failure detectors. We then show how to solve it using a new failure detector, called heartbeat. In contrast to previous failure detectors that have been used to circumvent impossibility results, the heartbeat failure detector is implementable, and its implementation does not use timeouts. These results have wide applicability: they can be used to transform many existing algorithms that tolerate only process crashes into quiescent algorithms that tolerate both process crashes and message losses. This can be applied to consensus, atomic broadcast, k-set agreement, atomic commitment, etc. The heartbeat failure detector is novel: besides being implementable without timeouts, it does not output lists of suspects as t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: WDAG
• Authors: Marcos Kawazoe Aguilera, Wei Chen, Sam Toueg
• Keywords: Algorithms, Failure Detector, Heartbeat Failure Detector, Process Crashes, WDAG 1997