Dynamic voting

Abstract

In a voting-based algorithm, a replicated file can be updated in a partition if it contains a majority of copies. In this paper, we propose an extension of this scheme which permits a file to be updated in a partition provided it contains a majority of up-to-date copies. Our scheme not only preserves mutual consistency of the replicated file, but provides improvement in its availability as well. We develop a stochastic model which gives insight into the improvements afforded by our scheme over the voting scheme.