A supervisor-based semi-centralized network surveillance scheme and the fault detection latency bound

Network surveillance (NS) schemes facilitate fast learning by each interested fault free node in the system of the faults or repair completion events occurring in other parts of the system. Currently concrete real time NS schemes effective in distributed computer systems based on point to point network architectures are scarce. We present a semi centralized real time NS scheme effective in a variety of point to point networks, called the supervisor based NS (SNS) scheme. This scheme is highly scalable and can be implemented entirely in software using commercial off the shelf (COTS) components without requiring any special purpose hardware support. An efficient execution support for the scheme has been designed as a new extension of the DREAM kernel, a timeliness guaranteed operating system kernel model developed in the authors´ laboratory. This design can be viewed as an implementation model which can be easily adapted to various commercial operating system kernels. The paper also presents an analysis of the SNS scheme on the basis of the implementation model to obtain some tight bounds on the fault detection latency