Assessing the Impact of Geographically Correlated Failures on Overlay-Based Data Dissemination

This paper addresses reliability of data dissemination applications when there are severe disruptions to the underlying physical infrastructure. Such massive simultaneous physical failures can happen during the geographical events such as natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, tornados) or sudden power outages - infrastructure failures in these cases are geographically correlated. In particular, we focus on overlay based data dissemination mechanisms and explore their ability to tolerate such large geographically correlated failures. Due to the tight correlation between multiple overlay links and a single physical link, a few physical failures may affect lots of overlay links. To enable reliable dissemination under such conditions, we propose overlay network construction methods that incorporate proximity-aware neighbor selection methods to improve the performance of the overlay data dissemination, to the extent possible, in terms of reliability and latency. In this approach, the overlay nodes select neighbors which are most likely distinct in presence of a geographical failure; we show how an overlay structure constructed using our proximity-aware neighbor selection techniques can disseminate data to over 80% of reachable end clients without any significant additional latency under various geographical failure conditions.