Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems

Hayashibara. (1996). Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems. ACM, 43(2), 225-267.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1996

Volume

43

Issue

2

Pages

225-267

DOI

10.1145/226643.226647

DOI registrant

Association for Computing Machinery

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/226643.226647

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Domain-specific

• Terminating Reliable Broadcast
  • The entry records a descriptive analytical identity; practical use requires the governing domain's evidence, standards, and safety obligations.

Mechanisms

• Failure Detector and Heartbeat Service
  • Its strength is faster, adaptive reaction to failure plus actionable diagnostics — the practical realization of the unreliable failure detector idea
• Heartbeat and Suspicion Detector
  • Its danger is that in a truly asynchronous network **no detector can be both complete and accurate

    This sourceEstablishes the impossibility of a perfect failure detector in a purely asynchronous crash-failure model and the possibility of falsely suspecting a healthy process.

• Heartbeat Touch
  • The impossibility of perfectly distinguishing "slow" from "dead" over a timeout is fundamental, not a tuning bug.

    This sourceModels failure detectors in asynchronous systems as inherently fallible, including mistaken suspicion of processes that are only slow.

• Silent Monitor Assurance Review
  • The right frame is the dead man's switch — a heartbeat whose silence must itself be actively distinguished from a failed transmitter.

    This sourceExplains that asynchronous failure detectors can make mistakes because the absence of a timely response does not reliably distinguish a crashed process from delay.

Verification

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