Error detection and diagnosis for fault tolerance in distributed systems

The early error detection and the understanding of the nature and conditions of an error occurrence can be useful to make an effective and efficient recovery in distributed systems. Various distributed system extensions were introduced for the implementation of fault tolerance in distributed software systems. These extensions rely mainly on the exchange of contextual information appended to every transmitted application specific message. Ideally, this information should be used for checkpointing, error detection, diagnosis and recovery should a transient failure occur later during the distributed program execution. In this paper, we present a generalized extension suitable for fault-tolerant distributed systems such as communication software systems and its detection capabilities are shown. Our extension is based on the execution of message validity test prior to the transmission of messages and the piggybacking of contextual information to facilitate the detection and diagnosis of transient faults in the distributed system. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.