Abstract
When a data file is replicated at more than one site, it is of interest to detect corruption by comparing the multiple copies. In order to reduce the amount of messaging for large files, techniques based on page signatures and combined signatures have been explored. However, for 3 or more sites, the known methods assume that the number of corrupted page copies is at most ⌊M/2⌋ − 1, where M is the number of sites. This is a pessimistic assumption which is unrealistic. In this paper, this assumption is replaced by another assumption which is shown to be reasonable. Based on this assumption, and based on a finer model of the system, three distributed algorithms are derived, which can either improve the performance or provide more tolerance to corruptions compared to previous methods. As in some previous work, the amount of signature transmission in the algorithms varies according to the number and patterns of page copy corruptions that actually occur, and two of the algorithms achieve the optimal amount of signature transmission when no failure occurs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
K.A.S. Abdel-Ghaffar and A. El Abbadi (1993). Efficient Detection of Corrupted Pages in a Replicated File 12th ACM Symposium on Principles on Distributed Computing. Pages 219-227.
K.A.S. Abdel-Ghaffar and A. El Abbadi (1993). Comparing multiple file copies with a primary copy using minimal communication. Technical Report TRCS 93-8, Department of Computing Science, University of California at Santa Barbara. May 1993.
K.A.S. Abdel-Ghaffar and A. El Abbadi (1994). An optimal strategy for comparing file copies”, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Jan 1994, Pages 87-93.
D. Barbara, H. Garcia-Molina and B. Feijoo. Exploiting symmetries for low-cost comparison of file copies. (1988). Proc.Int.Conf.Distributed Comput.Syst. June 1988. Pages 471-479.
R.E. Blahut (1984). Theory and Practice of Error Control Codes. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA.
A. Fu and S. C. Chau. (1996). Locating more corruptions in a Replicated File. 15th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems(SRDS). Pages 168-177.
W. Fuchs, K.L.Wu and J.A. Abraham (1986). Low-cost comparison and diagnosis of large remotely located files. Proc.Symp.Reliability of Distributed Software and Database Systems. Jan 1986. Pages 67-73.
J.J. Metzner (1983). A parity structure for large remotely located replicated data files. IEEE Transactions on Computers. Aug 1983. C-32:727-730.
J.J. Metzner (1986). Reliable and efficient broadcast of files to a group of locally interconnected stations. Proc.GLOBECOM' 86. Pages 1762-1767.
J.J. Metzner (1991). Efficient replicated remote file comparison. IEEE Transactions on Computers. May 1991, C-40(5):651-660.
J.J. Metzner, J.J. and ? Kapturowski (1990). A general decoding technique applicable to replicated file disagreement location and concatenated code decoding. IEEE Transactions on Inform.Theory. July, 1990. IT-36:911-917.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fu, A.W., Chau, SC. Locating Corruptions in a Replicated File in a Distributed Environment. The Journal of Supercomputing 13, 71–97 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008066818394
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008066818394