Timing Failure Detection and Real-Time Group Communication in
Quasi-Synchronous Systems
Carlos Almeida and Paulo Veríssimo
Selected sections of this report will appear in the Proceedings of the
8th Euromicro Workshop on Real-Time Systems, L'Aquila, Italy, June
1996.
Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of having real-time group
communication in systems that are not completely synchronous
(quasi-synchronous). This situation can happen when load is
not completely controlled thus not ruling out overload scenarios. This
is usually related to dynamic characteristics of the application
and/or environment. Usually, in such systems, temporal guarantees can
only be made to the highest priority messages.
In such scenario we propose to use the highest priority messages (or a
dedicated synchronous channel if available) to implement a timing failure
detection service. By using this service together with the
communication protocols, we are able to provide
safety in a timely fashion, which is of utmost importance for distributed
fault-tolerant real-time applications.
Also available
extended report (gzip postscript).