Cooperative failure detection in overlay multicast

Node failures and ungraceful departures are important issues to be dealt with in overlay multicast. Fast detection is key to minimizing the disruption of service to the affected nodes participating in the multicast session. In this paper, we propose a cooperative failure detection mechanism that can greatly reduce the failure detection time. A significant contribution of the paper is that we quantify three important measures, i.e., the expected detection time, the probability of false failure detection, and the overhead. This allows us to study the fundamental tradeoff among them in the failure detection mechanisms. The analysis and simulations show that the proposed cooperative failure detection mechanism can significantly reduce the failure detection time while maintaining the probability of false positive at the same level, at the cost of slightly increased overhead.