Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Peer to Peer Network Management Systems

In this paper we propose a 3-tier hierarchical architecture which is based on peer to peer model for network management purpose. The main focus of the proposed architecture is provisioning fault tolerance property which in turn leads to increasing the availability of the Network Management System (NMS). In each tier of the architecture we use redundancy to achieve the aforementioned goal. However we do not use redundant peers thus no peer redundancy is imposed to the system. Instead we use some selected peers in several roles and therefore only add some software redundancy which is easily tolerable by advanced processors of NMS's peers. Due to the hierarchal structure failure of nodes in each tier may affect NMS's availability differently. Therefore we examined the effect of failure of peers which play different roles in the architecture on the availability of the system by means of extensive simulation study. The results show that the proposed architecture offers higher availability in comparison to previously proposed peer to peer NMS. It also offered lower sensitivity to failure of nodes.