Abstract
In decentralised systems, replication is commonly used to provide a certain degree of fault tolerance. Whereas many systems only consider the failure of individual system nodes, partitionable systems also consider network link faults that can cause the system to be divided into isolated parts. Replication in the presence of network partitioning is problematic, as updates to replicas in different partitions can lead to data inconsistencies that are not detected until the partitioning is repaired. The degree to which temporary or permanent inconsistencies can be tolerated depends heavily on the application.
We exploit commutativity to define a group of replication protocols that improve the performance for operations without order constraints on replicated objects. The protocols provide a way to trade consistency for improved availability in the presence of partitions and also simplify the reconciliation process, when two or more partitions are merged. The protocols have been implemented in the DeDiSys add-on for the CORBA middleware and some performance results are provided.
This work has been partially funded by the European Community under the FP6 IST project DeDiSys (Dependable Distributed Systems, contract number 004152) and by FEDER and the Spanish MEC under grants TIN2006-14738-C02-01 and BES-2007-17362.
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Beyer, S., Ruiz-Fuertes, M.I., Galdámez, P., Muñoz-Escoí, F.D. (2007). Exploiting Commutativity for Efficient Replication in Partitionable Distributed Systems. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z., Herrero, P. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2007: OTM 2007 Workshops. OTM 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4806. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76890-6_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76890-6_34
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