Fault Tolerance in Decentralized and Loosely Coupled Systems

Intelligence in networking is gradually shifting from the network nodes to the terminal equipment. As a logical consequence of this development, we will eventually see networks that function without any centralized infrastructure. Personal and interpersonal ad hoc networks will most probably be the first examples of such systems. In this paper, we study fault tolerance from the point of view of these kinds of totally decentralized systems. That is, when a network consists of a number of loosely coupled nodes with intermittent connectivity, the situation is completely different from more traditional, completely connected and centralized systems. More specifically, we focus on ad hoc networks, and the impact of IP version 6 and Jini on the fault tolerance of the network and service layers of ad hoc networks.