Analysis of Large-Scale Service Network Tolerance to Cascading Failure

The future Internet will be populated with a massive number of cooperating services due to the rapid growth of publicly available services and the adoption of service-oriented computing (SOC) into the Internet of Things. The adoption of SOC enables combining the functionalities of smart devices as combining services by means of service composition. These cooperating services form a large-scale service network where the nodes and the links represent services and the dependency between services, respectively. The dependency between services potentially causes cascading failure, where the failure of a service propagates to its dependent services. Due to the lack of research in this type of cascading failure, we analyzed cascading failure in service networks for different topology and different degree of service interdependency. We found that the number of cascading failure is somewhat linear to the average number of required services, and decays exponentially over the average number of alternate services. The latter suggests that cascading failure tolerance can be significantly improved by adding few alternate services to each required service if the average number of alternate services is currently low. In addition, we also found that scale-free topology provides better tolerance, subsequently followed by exponential and random topology.