An investigation into soft-state protocol parameters

Abstract

This paper addresses an approach of improving the consistency in soft-state based systems. The consistency in such a system is affected by many parameters; some are given by the environment while others are tunable. The environment parameters are the loss probability and latency of the channel between the endpoints, and the change rate of the source state.The tunable parameters are the refresh period and timeout period. We study how to specify the refresh and timeout periods as functions of the other parameters and evaluate whether such functions are useful to improve the system consistency. To that end, we performed simulation experiments with different parameter values and we investigated the relationship between them. Our results show that the consistency of a system using the timeout period based on the proposed function increases significantly, especially when used in a lossy environment. As for the refresh period, our results show that the lowest inconsistency is achieved when the refresh period is about the same as the channel latency