IDF: an Inconsistency Detection Framework – Performance Modeling and Guide to Its Design

With the increased popularity of replica-based services in distributed systems such as the Grid, consistency control among replicas becomes more and more important. To this end, IDF (Inconsistency Detection Framework), a two-layered overlay-based architecture, has been proposed as a new way to solve this problem—instead of enforcing a predefined protocol, IDF detects inconsistency in a timely manner when it occurs and resolves it based on applications’ semantics. This paper presents a comprehensive analytical study of IDF to assess its performance and provide insight into its design. More specifically, it develops an analytical model to characterize IDF. Based on this model, we evaluate the successful rate of inconsistency detection within the top layer, which directly impacts the performance of IDF. In addition, this model helps derive a unified formula to characterize a wide range of applications, providing practitioners and protocol designers with quantitative insights into the IDF design that can be potentially optimized to specific applications.