Paper Info
Title
Evaluating the Impact of Simultaneous Round Participation and Decentralized Decision on the Performance of Consensus
Abstract
Consensus services have been recognized as fundamental building blocks for fault-tolerant distributed systems. Many different protocols to implement such a service have been proposed, however, not a lot of effort has been placed in evaluating their performance. In particular, in the context of round-based consensus protocols for asynchronous systems augmented with failure detectors, there has been some work on evaluating how the QoS of the failure detector impacts the performance of the protocols, as well as on the trade-off between having faster decentralized decision at the expenses of generating more network load. These studies, however, focus on protocols that have no mechanism to deal with an eventual bad QoS provided by the failure detector, and have a decision pattern that is either completely centralized - only one process being able to autonomously decide - or completely decentralized - all processes being able to autonomously decide. This paper reports a thorough evaluation of the performance of a consensus protocol that has two unique features. Firstly, it mitigates the problems due to bad QoS delivered by the failure detector by allowing processes to simultaneously participate in multiple rounds. Secondly, it allows its decision pattern to be configured to have different numbers of processors allowed to autonomously decide. We have measured the decision latency of the protocol to conduct the performance analysis. The results, obtained by means of simulation, highlight the advantages and limitations of the two mechanisms and allow one to understand in a comprehensive framework how the protocol's parameters should be set, such that the best performance is achieved depending on the application's requirements.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1109/DSN.2007.43
Edinburgh
Keywords
Field
DocType
heart,information analysis,detectors,failure detector,protocols,col,distributed computing,distributed processing,asynchronous system
Asynchronous communication,Failure detector,Computer science,Latency (engineering),Fault tolerant distributed systems,Computer network,Quality of service,Real-time computing,Detector,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1530-0889
0-7695-2855-4
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.42
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Livia Sampaio1243.99
Michel Hurfin226629.30
Francisco Vilar Brasileiro372147.10
Fabíola Greve49111.20