A Failure Detection Service for Internet-Based Multi-AS Distributed Systems

Failure detectors are one of the basic building blocks of fault-tolerant distributed systems. A failure detector is a distributed oracle that provides information about the state of processes of a distributed system. This work presents a failure detector service for Internet-based distributed systems that span multiple autonomous systems. The service is based on monitors which are capable of providing global process state information through a SNMP interface. A monitor executes on each network where processes are monitored. Monitors at different networks communicate across the Internet using Web Services. The system was implemented and evaluated for monitored processes running both at a single LAN and distributed throughout the world in Planet Lab. Experimental results are presented, showing CPU usage, failure detection latency, and mistake rate.