Analysis of Static and Dynamic Configurability of Existing Group Communication Systems

Abstract: Active replication following the state machine replication (SMR) approach is a way to make existing systems and services more reliable and fault-tolerant. The additional communication overhead has a negative impact on the system's throughput and overall request latency. Today's systems should be highly optimized to their execution environment and usage scenario in order to remedy the performance loss introduced by such group communication systems (GCS). In addition to that, systems should be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions. This report analyzes the available configuration options of three existing GCSs. Therefore, it explains the available configuration parameters and describes the given reconfiguration mechanisms. The found parameters are then classified in a parameter scheme.