Improving the availability of P2P-based network management systems by provisioning fault tolerance property

In this paper we propose a 3-tier hierarchical architecture which is based on peer-to-peer model for network management purpose. The main focus of the proposed architecture is provisioning fault tolerance property which in turn leads to increasing the availability of the Network Management System (NMS). In each tier of the architecture we use redundancy to achieve the aforementioned goal. However, we do not use redundant peers thus no peer redundancy is imposed to the system. Instead we use some selected peers in several roles and therefore only add some software redundancy which is easily tolerable by advanced processors of NMS’s peers. Due to the hierarchical structure, failure of nodes in each tier may affect NMS’s availability differently. Therefore we examined the effect of failure of peers which play different roles in the architecture on the availability of the system by means of extensive simulation study. The results show that the architecture proposed offers higher availability in comparison to previously proposed peer-to-peer NMS. It also offered lower vulnerability to failure of nodes when nodes are repairable.