Fault-Tolerant Network-Server Architecture for Time-Critical Web Applications

摘要

Parallel to recent evolution in web content, technologies such as WebSockets and WebRTC allow development of real-time web applications - something that has not been possible in RESTful HTTP platforms. Future IoT applications will also require real-time data retrieval as information travels through and is processed by web servers. For these reasons, we envision a demand for real-time web applications which require a high cost to service providers in case of service interruption. A time-critical real-time application is assumed to have the capability to handle failures in infrastructure, not with a service interruption, but with minor performance degradation. In this study, a fully-redundant system architecture for web server deployment, including the network and server, with fast failover capabilities is presented. Unlike interruptions that require applications to be re-initialized, this proposed system provides fail-over speeds for every component, such that, even the fast real-time applications can continue to operate. Experiments with application scenarios prove superior failover speeds under several test cases and reveal limitations in the latest technologies in supporting the aforementioned applications.