ER-TCP: an efficient TCP fault-tolerance scheme for cluster computing

摘要

This paper proposes a novel scheme, named ER-TCP, which transparently masks the failures happened on the server nodes of a cluster from clients at TCP connection granularity. In this scheme, TCP connections at the server side are actively and fully replicated to remain consistency so as to be transplanted over healthy parts during failure. A log mechanism is designed to cooperate with the replication to achieve small sacrifice on the performance of communication and makes the scheme scales beyond a few nodes, even when they have different processing capacities. We built a prototype system at a four-node cluster with ER-TCP, and conducted a series of experiments on that. The experimental result told us that ER-TCP has relatively small penalty on the communication performance, especially when it is used to synchronize multiple replicas. The results of real applications show that ER-TCP will incur small sacrifice on performance of web server at light load, and it can be used to distribute files very efficiently and reliably.