Fate-sharing is an engineering design philosophy where related parts of a system are yoked together, so that they either fail together or not at all. Fate-sharing is an example of the
end-to-end principle
The end-to-end principle is a design framework in computer networking. In networks designed according to this principle, guaranteeing certain application-specific features, such as reliability and security, requires that they reside in the commu ...
. The term "fate-sharing" was defined by
David D. Clark
David Dana "Dave" Clark (born April 7, 1944) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Scienc ...
in his 1988 paper "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols" as follows:
:The fate-sharing model suggests that it is acceptable to lose the state information associated with an entity if, at the same time, the entity itself is lost. Specifically, information about transport level synchronization is stored in the host which is attached to the net and using its communication service.
A good example of fate-sharing is the transmission of routing messages in
routing protocol
A routing protocol specifies how routers communicate with each other to distribute information that enables them to select routes between nodes on a computer network. Routers perform the traffic directing functions on the Internet; data packets ...
s such as
BGP
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous system (Internet), autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector ...
, where the failure of a link or link interface automatically has the effect of terminating
routing announcements through that interface, ultimately resulting in the tearing down of the state for that route at each end of the link. Similar considerations apply to
TCP
TCP may refer to:
Science and technology
* Transformer coupled plasma
* Tool Center Point, see Robot end effector
Computing
* Transmission Control Protocol, a fundamental Internet standard
* Telephony control protocol, a Bluetooth communication s ...
.
References
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Internet architecture
Programming paradigms