Mitigation of Delayed Management Costs in Transaction-Oriented Systems

Abstract: Abundant examples of complex transaction-oriented networks (TONs) can be found in a variety of disciplines, including information and communication technology, finances, commodity trading, and real estate. A transaction in a TON is executed as a sequence of subtransactions associated with the network nodes, and is committed if every subtransaction is committed. A subtransaction incurs a two-fold overhead on the host node: the fixed transient operational cost and the cost of long-term management (e.g. archiving and support) that potentially grows exponentially with the transaction length. If the overall cost exceeds the node capacity, the node fails and all subtransaction incident to the node, and their parent distributed transactions, are aborted. A TON resilience can be measured in terms of either external workloads or intrinsic node fault rates that cause the TON to partially or fully choke. We demonstrate that under certain conditions, these two measures are equivalent. We further show that the exponential growth of the long-term management costs can be mitigated by adjusting the effective operational cost: in other words, that the future maintenance costs could be absorbed into the transient operational costs.