Key-based consistency and availability in structured overlay networks

Structured Overlay Networks provide a promising platform for high performance applications since they are scalable, fault-tolerant and self-managing. Structured overlays provide lookup services that map keys to nodes that can be used as processing or storage resources. The lookups for a key may return inconsistent results. Consequently, it is nontrivial to provide consistent data services on the top of structured overlays that are built on key-based search. In this paper, we study the frequency of occurrence of inconsistent lookups. We show that the effect of lookup inconsistencies can be reduced by assigning responsibility of key intervals to nodes. We present our results as a trade-off between consistency and availability of keys. Further, since many distributed applications employ quorum techniques at their core, we analyze the probability that majority-based quorum techniques will function correctly in a structured overlay with inconsistent lookups. Our analysis shows that the p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Tallat M. Shafaat, Thorsten Schütt, Monika Moser, Seif Haridi, Ali Ghodsi, Alexander Reinefeld
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPDC 2008, Inconsistent Lookups, Overlays Provide Lookup, Structured Overlay