Architectural support for mode-driven fault tolerance in distributed applications
Deepti Srivastava, Priya Lakshmi Narasimhan · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2005
Many distributed applications exhibit different types of system behaviors, or modes , during the course of their operation. Each such mode may have different functional and non-functional requirements (such as fault tolerance, availability, and security). A static software fault-tolerance solution can not cater to the needs of every mode, and also does not utilize system resources intelligently. A flexible architecture is required to provide dependability that can be tailored for such applications. We propose a novel mode-driven fault-tolerance approach that includes: (i) a generic framework to extend the specification of modes with fault-tolerance requirements, and (ii) a software architecture that uses this description to provide the appropriate fault tolerance for each mode at runtime. We also present a case study using a distributed multi-modal CORBA application to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.