An Autonomic Majority Quorum System
Luiz Antonio Belletti Rodrigues, Luciana Arantes, Elias P. Duarte · 2016
A quorum system is a collection of process sets (quorums) which intersect among themselves. Quorums are used by many distributed applications such as mutual exclusion, data replication, and for the dissemination of information. This work presents an autonomic solution to build a majority quorum system that is self-adaptive by dymically reconfiguring itself if processes fail. Processes can fail by crashing and crashes are permanent. The proposed solution is defined over a VCube - a virtual hypercube-like topology [1], and uses failure information from the VCube's monitoring system. Each quorum is built so that any quorum has a majority of the faulty-free processes of the system. Upon the detection of a failure, the quorum system reconfigures automatically, tolerating up to n-1 crashed processes. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm compared with other solutions of the literature.