Efficient Consensus-Free Weight Reassignment for Atomic Storage (Extended Version)

Abstract

Weighted voting is a conventional approach to improving the performance of replicated systems based on commonly-used majority quorum systems in heterogeneous environments. In long-lived systems, a weight reassignment protocol is required to reassign weights over time in order to accommodate performance variations accordingly. The weight reassignment protocol should be consensus-free in asynchronous failure-prone systems because of the impossibility of solving consensus in such systems. This paper presents an efficient consensus-free weight reassignment protocol for atomic storage systems in heterogeneous, dynamic, and asynchronous message-passing systems. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed protocol improves the performance of atomic read/write storage implemented by majority quorum systems compared with previous solutions.