Sense-Share: A Framework for Resilient Collaborative Service Performance Monitoring

Abstract

Modern large-scale networked services, such as video streaming, are typically deployed at multiple locations in the network to provide redundancy and load balancing. Different techniques are used to provide performance monitoring information so that client nodes can select the best service instance. One of them is collaborative sensing, where clients share measurement results on the observed service performance to build a common ground of knowledge with low overhead. Clients can then use this common ground to select the most suitable service provider. However, collaborative algorithms are susceptible to false measurements sent by malfunctioning or malicious nodes, which decreases the accuracy of the performance sensing process. We propose Sense-Share, a simple light-weight and resilient collaborative sensing framework based on the similarity of the client nodes’ perception of service performance. Our experimental evaluation in different topologies shows that service performance sensing using Sense-Share achieves, on average, 94% similarity to non-collaborative brute force performance sensing, tolerating faulty nodes. Furthermore, our approach effectively distributes the service monitoring requests over the service nodes and exploits direct inter-node communication to share measurements, resulting in reduced monitoring overhead.