Injecting Communication Faults to Experimentally Validate Java Distributed Applications

摘要

The use of Java to develop highly available network services and the inherent unreliability of communication systems require the validation of its fault tolerance mechanisms to avoid unexpected behavior during execution. Tools for testing distributed programs that must remain operational in a faulty environment are not common and are generally difficult to operate. One possible solution is applying a fault injector to emulate communication faults and test the behavior of the distributed application under these faults. We developed Jaca.net, an extension of the fault injector based on computational reflection Jaca, to include UDP communication faults to its fault model. Potential target applications of Jaca and Jaca.net are the ones developed in Java. Using Jaca.net, software developers can complete the test cycle validating the high level fault detection and recovery mechanisms built on their applications.