A provenance-aware weighted fault tolerance scheme for service-based applications

Abstract

Service-orientation has been proposed as a way of facilitating the development and integration of increasingly complex and heterogeneous system components. However, there are many new challenges to the dependability community in this new paradigm, such as how individual channels within fault-tolerant systems may invoke common services as part of their workflow, thus increasing the potential for common-mode failure. We propose a scheme that - for the first time - links the technique of provenance with that of multi-version fault tolerance. We implement a large test system and perform experiments with a single-version system, a traditional MVD system, and a provenance-aware MVD system, and compare their results. We show that for this experiment, our provenance-aware scheme results in a much more dependable system than either of the other systems tested, whilst imposing a negligible timing overhead.