Analysis of a Fault-Tolerant Framework for Reliability Prediction of Service-Oriented Architecture Systems

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular choice for building software application in the last years. An SOA system is an elastic structure that utilizes services discovery and integrates these services to perform specified functions. In general, reliability is a critical system attribute when evaluating the quality of a well-built software applications. But it has to be noted that the phenomenon of error propagation could have significant impacts on system reliability. Propagated errors may be masked or propagated to the system interface, which can thereby lead to a system failure. Much research on reliability evaluation for SOA systems have been proposed in the past. However, most of these studies have neglected the phenomenon of error propagation and the issue of link failure. In this article, we take a different view of error propagation, fault tolerance, and the failure behavior of links between services and try to develop an enhanced SOA reliability prediction model incorporating error propagation and fault tolerance (EP-FT). Different fault tolerance techniques will be selected and integrated into the SOA systems. Additionally, sensitivity analysis is also presented and discussed to determine the critical services in the system. Experiments are performed based on four real-world case studies. We will show and discuss the experimental results of the proposed EP-FT reliability model and simulation-based approach in detail. Our experimental results show that the impact of error propagation on system reliability is not negligible, and the SOA systems with fault tolerance demonstrate higher reliability than those that do not.