Providing Fault Tolerance Mechanism in Clinical Support System Through Fog Computing as Middleware

Abstract

Fault tolerance is one of the paradigms for providing high availability in computerized system where application service is replicated to multiple nodes. The paradigm is widely used in cloud computing environment where users may benefit automatic backup when the application such as clinical support system is deployed in cloud. However, application residing in premise such as small clinics are still prone to outage and would require certain time with human involvement when performing recovery. Thus, the objective of this research is to provide a backup mechanism for health system residing in-premise of a clinic. We proposed the use of fog computing model that acts as middleware for detecting and failover solution when an outage has temporarily occurred. The middleware will perform failure detection through heartbeat and replicate the services at the same time. When an outage is detected, the middleware will take action to take over as secondary service provider to ensure applications may be used seamlessly.