Enhancing group communication with self-manageable behavior

Abstract

Group communication protocols (GCPs) play an important role in the design of modern distributed systems. A typical GCP exchanges control messages to provide message delivery guarantees, and a key point in the configuration of such a protocol is to establish the right trade-off between message overhead and delivery latency. This trade-off becomes even a greater challenge in systems where computing resources and application requirements may change at runtime. In such scenarios, the configuration of a GCP must be continuously re-adjusted to attain certain performance goals, or to adapt to current resource availability. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing self-managing mechanisms based on feedback control theory to a GCP especially designed to be self-manageable; in the proposed protocol, message overhead and delivery latency can be adjusted at runtime to follow some new operating set-point. The evaluation performed under varied scenarios shows the effectiveness of our approach.