A rotating roll-call-based adaptive failure detection and recovery protocol for smart home environments

Abstract

Smart homes generally differ from other pervasive environments such as office environments. Homes are lack of system administrators to fix faulty services on the spot. Nevertheless, services in smart homes can be critical especially when they involve health and wellness services, since faulty services can lead to unexpected/undesirable consequences. Therefore, robustness and availability are two fundamental requirements for service management protocols or middleware at homes. In this paper, we propose an efficient and adaptive failure detection and recovery mechanism, namely, the Rotating Roll-Call-based Protocol (RRCP), for home environments. Failures of software components are detected efficiently with a roll-call-based algorithm in which the roll-caller is elected periodically. Adaptive techniques and reliable UDP are adopted to maintain home network stability. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol is robust even under elevated failure rates. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.