Technical Report: DCC-2010-02

On the Impact of Fault-Tolerance Mechanisms in a Peer-to-Peer Middleware

Rolando Martins

EFACEC / CRACS & INESC-Porto
E-mail: rolando.martins@efacec.com

Priya Narasimhan

Carnegie Mellon University
E-mail: priya@cs.cmu.edu

Luís Lopes, Fernando M. Silva

CRACS & INESC-Porto/DCC-FCUP
E-mail: {lblopes,fds}@dcc.fc.up.pt


April 2010

Abstract

We address the problem of integrating real-time fault-tolerance mechanisms into peer-to-peer systems, with specific architecture and deployment constraints. For this purpose we implemented a prototype hierarchical peer-to-peer framework in which the leaf peers are sensors that generate different kinds of traffic such as mesh management, events, video and audio. We evaluate the framework by measuring packet loss, response time, jitter and mesh overhead for each type of traffic under peer failure. We report significant gains in QoS for all types of traffic, when using the fault-tolerance mechanisms, with minimal response time and mesh management overhead.