Network applications and services need to be environment-aware in order to meet quality-of-service requirements in an increasingly dynamic world. In this paper we consider partition awareness as an instance of environment awareness in network applications that need to be reliable and self-managing Partition-aware applications dynamically reconfigure themselves and adjust the quality of their services in response to network partitions and merges. As such, they can automatically adapt to changes in the environment and remain available in multiple partitions with perhaps degraded or reduced services, but without blocking. We propose a system layer consisting of group membership and reliable multicast services that provides systematic support for partition-aware application development. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed interface by solving three problems that represent different classes of realistic network applications.
展开▼
