Service fault tolerance for highly reliable service-oriented systems: an overview

Service-oriented systems are widely-employed in e-business, e-government, finance, management systems, and so on. Service fault tolerance is one of the most important techniques for building highly reliable service-oriented systems. In this paper, we provide an overview of various service fault tolerance techniques,including sections on fault tolerance strategy design, fault tolerance strategy selection, and Byzantine fault tolerance. In the first section, we introduce the design of static and dynamic fault tolerance strategies, as well as the major problems when designing fault tolerance strategies. After that, based on various fault tolerance strategies, in the second section, we identify significant components from a complex service-oriented system, and investigate algorithms for optimal fault tolerance strategy selection. Finally, in the third section, we discuss a special type of service fault tolerance techniques, i.e., the Byzantine fault tolerance.