A Novel Quorum Protocol

Abstract

One of the traditional mechanisms used in distributed systems for maintaining the consistency of replicated data is voting. A problem involved in voting mechanisms is the size of the Quorums needed on each access to the data. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient distributed algorithm for managing replicated data. We impose a logical wheel structure on the set of copies of an object. The protocol ensures minimum read quorum size of one, by reading one copy of an object while guaranteeing fault-tolerance of write operations.Wheel structure has a wider application area as it can be imposed in a network with any number of nodes.