A Self-Manageable Group Communication Protocol for Partially Synchronous Distributed Systems

In order to provide upper-layer applications with continuous message delivery and updated information on membership changes - due to process failures, leaves and joins -, group communication protocols must exchange messages and continuously monitor all group members, which in certain load conditions may incur unacceptable message overhead to the underlying communication system. Therefore, the design of such protocols must deal with the trade-off between performance requirements such as speed (e.g., delivery latency) and cost (e.g., message overhead). However, when the behavior of the computing environment is unknown and can change over time, or when the application requirements can dynamically change, self-configuring is a basic issue that is usually ignored in existing implementations. In this paper we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel self-manageable group communication protocol based on the feedback control theory, which is capable of self-configuring its operation parameters at run-time from previously specified requirements such as resource consumption.