Authors:
Esti Yeger Lotem,
Idit Keidar and
Danny Dolev.
In the Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
(PODC '97), pages 63-71, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, August
21-24, 1997.
Abstract:
Distributed applications often use quorums in order to guarantee
consistency. With emerging world-wide communication technology, many
new applications (e.g., conferencing applications and interactive games)
wish to allow users to freely join and leave, without restarting the
entire system. The dynamic voting paradigm allows such systems to
define quorums adaptively, accounting for the changes in the set of
participants. Furthermore, dynamic voting was proven to be the most
available paradigm for maintaining quorums in unreliable networks.
However, the subtleties of implementing dynamic voting were not well
understood; in fact, many of the suggested protocols may lead to
inconsistencies in case of failures. Other protocols severely limit
the availability in case failures occur during the protocol. In this
paper we present a robust and efficient dynamic voting protocol for
unreliable asynchronous networks. The protocol consistently maintains
the primary component in a distributed system. Our protocol allows the
system to make progress in cases of repetitive failures in which
previously suggested protocols block. The protocol is simple to
implement, and its communication requirements are small.
Postscript Version:
ps,
ps.gz.
Israel mirror site:
ps.gz.
Full version available as Technical Report CS96-7, Institute of
Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Israel, June 1996:
ps,
ps.gz,
Israel mirror site:
ps.gz.
ps.gz,
abstract.
Last modified: Mon Jul 1 14:35:23 EDT 2002