Technical Report: Benefits of Stabilization versus Rollback in Self-Stabilizing Graph-Based Applications on Eventually Consistent Key-Value Stores

Abstract: In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance of two approaches, namely self-stabilization and rollback, to handling consistency violating faults (\cvf) that occur when a self-stabilizing distributed graph-based program is executed on an eventually consistent key-value store. Consistency violating faults are caused by reading wrong values due to weaker level of consistency provided by the key-value store. One way to deal with these faults is to utilize rollback whereas another way is to rely on the property of self-stabilization that is expected to provide recovery from arbitrary states. We evaluate both these approaches in different case studies --planar graph coloring, arbitrary graph coloring, and maximal matching-- as well as for different problem dimensions such as input data characteristics, workload partition, and network latency. We also consider the effect of executing non-stabilizing algorithm with rollback with a similar stabilizing algorithm that does not utilize rollback.