Understanding iterative redundancy for vulnerability-driven fault tolerance strategy

Abstract

In the application of component-based distributed computing systems, many software systems allow the existence of large numbers of potentially faulty components. Faults are inevitable in this large-scale, complex, distributed components setting, which may include a lot of untrustworthy parts. How to provide a highly reliable component-based distributed system is a challenging problem. Redundancy and replication are generally utilized to realize the goal of fault tolerance. In this paper, we propose a technique of Critical Fault Iterative (CFI) redundancy, by which the efficiency can be guaranteed to make use of resources (e.g., computation, storage), and to create fault-tolerance applications. The function invocation relationships and invocation frequencies are employed to rank the importance of functions and identify the most vulnerable functions. A formal theoretical analysis and an experimental analysis are presented. Compared with the existing methods, the reliability of a component-based distributed system can be greatly improved by tolerating a small part of significant functions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.