An Adaptable Fault-Tolerance for SOA using a Peer-to-Peer Framework

The onset of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) in domains like trading and banking has considerably heightened the need for dependable system operation. Late binding to services in business-to-business operations pose a serious problem for dependable system operation as it delegates the decision to trust a service to an external agent. However, it is impossible to guarantee that any service is 100% fault-free due to failings in hardware, software and human error. This means that fault tolerance remains the most practical way to address the problem. Unfortunately, there is currently no standard way to achieve this in SOA. This paper describes a novel adaptable fault tolerance framework that overlays a peer network formed by JXTA technology protocols to address this problem. We have adopted a layered approach by incrementally adding protocols and supporting the code infrastructure. The framework is implemented exclusively in Java and XML to ensure cross platform compatibility.