An Eventually Perfect Failure Detector for Networks of Arbitrary Topology Connected with ADD Channels Using Time-To-Live Values

Abstract

We present an implementation of an eventually perfect failure detector in an arbitrarily connected, partitionable network. We assume ADD channels: for each one there exist constants K, D, not known to the processes, such that for every K consecutive messages sent in one direction, at least one is delivered within time D. The best previous implementation used messages of bounded size, but exponential in n, the number of nodes. The main contribution of this paper is a novel use of time-to-live values in the design of failure detectors, obtaining a flexible implementation that uses messages of size O(n log n)