A Network-Level Distributed Fault Injector for Experimental Validation of Dependable Distributed Systems

The use of Java for distributed systems and highavailable applications demands the validation of their fault tolerance mechanisms to avoid unexpected behavior during execution. We present an extension of FIONA (Fault Injector Oriented to Network Applications), a fault injection environment to experimentally validate the dependability of distributed Java applications. The main features of this extension are: its distributed architecture, which allows centralized configuration of multiple faults scenarios, and the support for a wider fault model associated with distributed systems, which includes network partitioning. For monitoring, FIONA supports the collection of log information and includes a helper application to integrate this information in a global log for post-mortem dependability analysis. FIONA is simple to operate, and we expect it will facilitate the conduction of validation experiments by application developers and testers.