Jgroup/ARM: a distributed object group platform with autonomous replication management

This paper presents the design and implementation of Jgroup/ARM, a distributed object group platform with autonomous replication management along with a novel measurement-based assessment technique that is used to validate the fault-handling capability of Jgroup/ARM. Jgroup extends Java RMI through the group communication paradigm and has been designed specifically for application support in partitionable systems. ARM aims at improving the dependability characteristics of systems through a fault-treatment mechanism. Hence, ARM focuses on deployment and operational aspects, where the gain in terms of improved dependability is likely to be the greatest. The main objective of ARM is to localize failures and to reconfigure the system according to application-specific dependability requirements. Combining Jgroup and ARM can significantly reduce the effort necessary for developing, deploying and managing dependable, partition-aware applications. Jgroup/ARM is evaluated experimentally to validate its fault-handling capability; the recovery performance of a system deployed in a wide area network is evaluated. In this experiment multiple nearly coincident reachability changes are injected to emulate network partitions separating the service replicas. The results show that Jgroup/ARM is able to recover applications to their initial state in several realistic failure scenarios, including multiple, concurrent network partitionings. Copyright (C) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.