Experimental Evaluation of a Failure Detection Service Based on a Gossip Strategy

Failure detectors were first proposed as an abstraction that makes it possible to solve consensus in asynchronous 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 detection service based on a gossip strategy. The service was implemented on the JXTA platform. A simulator was also implemented so the detector could be evaluated for a larger number of processes. Experimental results show that increasing the frequency in which gossip messages are sent gives better results than increasing the fallout. Results are included for fault and recovery detection time and mistake rate of the detector.