Diagnosis and Communication in Distributed Systems

Abstract

This paper discusses diagnosis problems in distributed systems within the context of a language-theoretic discrete event formalism. A distributed system is seen as a system with multiple spatially separated sites with each site having a diagnoser that observes some of the events generated by the system and diagnoses the faults associated with the site. We allow the diagnosers to share information by sending messages to each other. The existence and synthesis of diagnosers is investigated. The formulation and results are motivated by the diagnosis of failures in a wireless LAN. 1 Introduction We are interested in understanding the design of diagnostics for distributed systems. This theoretical work is motivated by our experience with the design of distributed diagnostics for coordinating vehicle systems [5, 10] and wireless local area networks [3, 6]. These systems are comprised of spatially separated sites (e.g., vehicles or radios) of semi-autonomous activity. Since these systems op...