xyz.ping.swim.bootstrap

SWIM ping bootstrap function for xyz-core.

This module implements the SWIM (Scalable Weakly-consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol) protocol with slight changes. You can referee to the main paper for more detail.

This protocol is more efficient than other ping modules of xyz and is suitable for deploy environment.

Description

our current ping system (the Default Ping) is known as a heartbeat approach. It's robust but quite overloaded. The basic SWIM has the following properties:

• an arbitrary node will choose a random ping target (M_i) at each ping period.
  • if the M-i answers successfully, the period ends.
  • if not, the node will choose K random ambassadors for indirect probing. It will send ping-req(M_i) to these K ambassadors. If all of them return a negative response, indicating that M_i is down, M_i will be kicked.
• if M_i is detected as down, this message will be multicasted to all other nodes.
  • It is an important note that since the failure detection phase is pretty strict, (1 + K nodes must fail to probe a node to mark it as down), this phase is based in trust, meaning that everyone in the system will trust this multicast message and will apply it without any further investigation.

Comparing it with the Default Ping, one big drawback is that our current ping messages carry a huge weight (serializedPathTree + nodes + servers). To address this issue, the SWIM ping uses two kinds of messages:

• an HTTP message will be used for introduction phase, during which all of the important information of a node will be carries to other nodes. This information contains serializedPathTree + nodes + servers.
• After the introduction the phase, the Probing phase kicks in which uses light-weight UDP messages inly carrying minimal information, such as the identifier (xyz.id().netId) of the sender.

Usage

The module can be installed using

$ npm install --save xyz.ping.swim.bootstrap

Like other pings, if it is to be used, you should disable the Default Ping:

var ms = new XYZ({
  selfConf: {
    defaultBootstrap: false
  },
  systemConf: {nodes: []}
})

You can later bootstrap your node using:

const SWIM = require('xyz.ping.swim.bootstrap')
stringMs.bootstrap(SWIM, config)

where config is an object with the following possible keys:

Note that all nodes using the same ping mechanism must use the same httpPrefix and udpPrefix.

SWIM ping supports join and seed nodes similar to how they function in Default Ping.

To see this in action, if you run a node using this and console.log your node you see:

____________________  TRANSPORT LAYER ____________________
Transport:
  outgoing middlewares:
    call.dispatch.mw [/CALL] || _httpExport[0]
    swim.http.dispatch.mw [/SPING_HTTP] || _httpExport[0]
    swim.udp.dispatch.mw [/SPING_UDP] || _udpExport[0]

  HTTPServer @ 4000 ::
    Middlewares:
    call.receive.mw [/CALL] || _httpMessageEvent[0]
    swim.http.receive.mw [/SPING_HTTP] || _authIntroduce[0] -> onHttpPingReceive[1]

  UDPServer @ 4001 ::
    Middlewares:
    swim.udp.receive.mw [/SPING_UDP] || onUdpPingReceive[0]

• swim.http.receive.mw [/SPING_HTTP] has been added to the default server (port 4000)
• a new UDP server has been created in xyz.id().port + 1 with swim.udp.receive.mw [/SPING_UDP] || onUdpPingReceive[0].
• Two new outgoing routes have been created, one for HTTP messages and one for UDP messages.