In: Proc. 24th Annual Int. Computer Software and Applications Conf. (COMPSAC-2000), 25-27 October 2000, Taipei, Taiwan, pages 608-613. 2000.
Abstract: This paper addresses reconfigurable algorithms for managing replicated data with strict consistency requirements, that is, whenever the user performs an update operation, the update is applied to all reachable copies as part of the update protocol. A key issue in designing such algorithms is to determine how often one should detect and react to failure conditions so that reorganization operations can be performed at the appropriate time to improve the availability of replicated data. This paper uses dynamic voting as a case study to illustrate how often such failure detection and reconfiguration activities should be performed so as to maximize the data availability. The paper shows that there exists an optimal period at which the failure detection and reconfiguration activities should be performed to optimize the system availability. Stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) are used as a tool to facilitate the analysis.
Keywords: data availability, data contention, data replication, distributed systems, dynamic voting, reconfigurable algorithms, reconfigurable systems, stochastic Petri nets, strict consistency.