Communication Issues in Distributed Systems

Networking

LANs, WANs

OSI protocol stack--well defined. In reality we have only some of the layers.

Internet protocols

The Client-Server Model

Addressing

How to locate?

  1. machine and port
  2. broadcast
  3. name servers

Blocking vs. Nonblocking Send

See old Fig 10-8

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) provides a different paradigm for accessing network services. Instead of accessing remote services by sending and receiving messages, a client invokes services by making a local procedure call. The local procedure hides the details of the network communication. When making a remote procedure call:

  1. The calling environment is suspended, procedure parameters are transferred across the network to the environment where the procedure is to execute, and the procedure is executed there.
  2. When the procedure finishes and produces its results, its results are transferred back to the calling environment, where execution resumes as if returning from a regular procedure call.

The main goal of RPC is to hide the existence of the network from a program. As a result, RPC doesn't quite fit into the OSI model:

  1. The message-passing nature of network communication is hidden from the user. The user doesn't first open a connection, read and write data, and then close the connection. Indeed, a client often doesn not even know they are using the network!
  2. RPC often omits many of the protocol layers to improve performance. Even a small performance improvement is important because a program may invoke RPCs often. For example, on (diskless) Sun workstations, every file access is made via an RPC.

RPC is especially well suited for client-server (e.g., query-response) interaction in which the flow of control alternates between the caller and callee. Conceptually, the client and server do not both execute at the same time. Instead, the thread of execution jumps from the caller to the callee and then back again.

RPC Steps

The following steps take place during an RPC (See Tanenbaum Fig 2-8):
  1. A client invokes a client stub procedure, passing parameters in the usual way. The client stub resides within the client's own address space.
  2. The client stub marshalls the parameters into a message. Marshalling includes converting the representation of the parameters into a standard format, and copying each parameter into the message.
  3. The client stub passes the message to the transport layer, which sends it to the remote server machine.
  4. On the server, the transport layer passes the message to a server stub, which demarshalls the parameters and calls the desired server routine using the regular procedure call mechanism.
  5. When the server procedure completes, it returns to the server stub (e.g., via a normal procedure call return), which marshalls the return values into a message. The server stub then hands the message to the transport layer.
  6. The transport layer sends the result message back to the client transport layer, which hands the message back to the client stub.
  7. The client stub demarshalls the return parameters and execution returns to the caller.

RPC Issues

Issues that must be addressed:
Marshalling:
Parameters must be marshalled into a standard representation. Parameters consist of simple types (e.g., integers) and compound types (e.g., C structures or Pascal records). Moreover, because each type has its own representation, the types of the various parameters must be known to the modules that actually do the conversion. For example, 4 bytes of characters would be uninterpreted, while a 4-byte integer may need to the order of its bytes reversed.
Semantics:
Call-by-reference not possible: the client and server don't share an address space. That is, addresses referenced by the server correspond to data residing in the client's address space. One approach is to simulate call-by-reference using copy-restore. In copy-restore, call-by-reference parameters are handled by sending a copy of the referenced data structure to the server, and on return replacing the client's copy with that modified by the server. However, copy-restore doesn't work in all cases. For instance, if the same argument is passed twice, two copies will be made, and references through one parameter only changes one of the copies.
Binding:
How does the client know who to call, and where the service resides? The most flexible solution is to use dynamic binding and find the server at run time when the RPC is first made. The first time the client stub is invoked, it contacts a name server to determine the transport address at which the server resides.
Transport protocol:
What transport protocol should be used?
Exception handling:
How are errors handled?

Binding

We'll examine one solution to the above issues by considering the approach taken by Birrell and Nelson [#!birrell-implementing-rpc!#]. Binding consists of two parts:
Naming
refers to what service the client wants to use. In B&N, remote procedures are named through interfaces. An interface uniquely identifies a particular service, describing the types and numbers of its arguments. It is similar in purpose to a type definition in programming languauges. For example, a ``phone'' service interface might specify a single string argument that returns a character string phone number.
Locating
refers to finding the transport address at which the server actually resides. Once we have the transport address of the service, we can send messages directly to the server.

In B&N's system, a server having a service to offer exports an interface for it. Exporting an interface registers it with the system so that clients can use it. A client must import an (exported) interface before communication can begin. The export and import operations are analogous to those found in object-oriented systems.

Interface names consists of two parts:

  1. A unique type specifies the interface (service) provided. Type is a high-level specification, such as ``mail'' or ``file access''.
  2. An instance specifies a particular server offering a type (e.g., ``file access on wpi'').

Name Server

B&N's RPC system was developed as part of a distributed system called Grapevine. Grapevine was developed at Xerox by the same research group the developed the Ethernet. Among other things, Grapevine provides a distributed, replicated database, implemented by servers residing at various locations around the internet. Clients can query, add new entries or modify existing entries in the database.

The Grapevine database maps character string keys to entries called RNames. There are two types of entries:

Individual:
A single instance of a service. Each server registers the transport address at which its service can be accessed and every instance of an interface is registered as an individual entry. Individual entries map instances to their corresponding transport addresses.
Group:
The type of an interface, which consists of a list of individual RNames. Group entries contain RNames that point to servers providing the service having that group name. Group entries map a type (interface) to a set of individual entries providing that service.

For example, if A and B both offered file access, the group entry ``file access'' would consists of two individual RNames, one for A and B's servers.

Failure Semantics of RPC

Unlike normal procedure calls, many things can go wrong with RPC. Normally, a client will send a request, the server will execute the request and then return a response to the client. What are appropriate semantics for server or network failures? Possibilities:

  1. Just hang forever waiting for the reply that will never come. This models regular procedure call. If a normal procedure goes into an infinite loop, the caller never finds out. Of course, few users will like such semantics.
  2. Time out and raise an exception or report failure to the client. Of course, finding an appropriate timer value is difficult. If the remote procedure takes a long time to execute, a timer might time-out too quickly.
  3. Time out and retransmit the request.

While the last possibility seems the most reasonable, it may lead to problems. Suppose that:

  1. The client transmits a request, the server executes it, but then crashes before sending a response. If we don't get a response, is there any way of knowing whether the server acted on the request?
  2. The server restarts, and the client retransmits the request. What happens? Now, the server will reject the retransmission because the supplied unique identifier no longer matches that in the server's export table. At this point, the client can decide to rebind to a new server and retry, or it can give up.
  3. Suppose the client rebinds to the another server, retransmits the request, and gets a response. How many times will the request have been executed? At least once, and possibly twice. We have no way of knowing.

Operations that can safely be executed twice are called idempotent. For example, fetching the current time and date, or retrieving a particular page of a file. Is deducting $10,000 from an account idempotent? No. One can only deduct the money once. Likewise, deleting a file is not idempotent. If the delete request is executed twice, the first attempt will be successful, while the second attempt produces a ``nonexistent file'' error.

RPC Semantics for Handling Failures

While implementing RPC, B&N determined that the semantics of RPCs could be categorized in various ways:

Exactly once:
The most desirable kind of semantics, where every call is carried out exactly once, no more and no less. Unfortunately, such semantics cannot be achieved at low cost; if the client transmits a request, and the server crashes, the client has no way of knowing whether the server had received and processed the request before crashing.
At most once:
When control returns to the caller, the operation will have been executed no more than once. What happens if the server crashes? If the server crashes, the client will be notified of the error, but will have no way of knowing whether or not the operation was performed.
At least once:
The client just keeps retransmitting the request until it gets the desired response. On return to the caller, the operation will have be performed at least one time, but possibly multiple times.

Transport Protocols for RPC

Can we implement RPC on top of an existing transport protocol such as TCP? Yes. However, reliable stream protocols are designed for a different purpose: high throughput. The cost of setting up and terminating a connection is insignificant in comparison to the amount of data exchanged. Most of the elapsed time is spent sending data. With RPC, low latency is more important than high throughput. If applications are going to use RPC much like they use regular procedures (e.g., over and over again), performance is crucial.

RPC can be characterized as a specific instance of transaction-oriented communication, where:

How many TCP packets would be required for a single request-response transaction? A minimum of 5 packets: 3 for the initial handshake, plus 2 for the FIN and FIN ACK (assuming that we can piggy back data and a FIN on the third packet of the 3-way handshake).

A transaction-oriented transport protocol should efficiently handle the following cases:

  1. Transactions in which both the request and response messages fit in a single packet. The response can serve as an acknowledgment, and the client handles the case of lost packets by retransmitting the original request.
  2. Large multi-packet request and response messages, where the data does not necessarily fit in a single packet. For instance, some systems use RPC to fetch pages of a file from a file server. A single-packet request would specify the file name, the starting position of the data desired, and the number of bytes to be read. The response may consist of several pages (e.g. 8K bytes) of data.

Message-Oriented Communication

RPC is not always satisfactory.

Message-passing systems are more general, but details are not as transparent to the user.

Issues:

Fig 2-22 shows many combinations:

  1. persistent asynchronous communication--continue to retry sending, email
  2. transient synchronous communication--continue to retry until receiver has a copy
  3. transient asynchronous communication--best effort (UDP)
  4. receipt-based transient synchronous communication--sender waits until receiver has a copy
  5. delivery-based transient synchronous communication--sender waits until receiver is ready for processing
  6. response-based transient synchronous communication--sender waits until receiver is done processing (RPC)

Group Communication

Three types of communication:

  1. unicast--point-to-point
  2. broadcast--one-to-all
  3. multicast--one-to-some (group)

Multicast is the most general and can subsume the other two. How is it supported?

Design Issues

Systems:

ISIS, research project from Cornell. Toolkit for building distributed applications.

MBONE, Internet Multicast backbone.


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