General structured voting: a flexible framework for modelling cooperations

Data replication schemes and mutual exclusion protocols can be regarded as special instances of cooperation schemes, which describe the interaction of independent nodes within a computer network to achieve a common goal. The author presents a new mechanism called general structured voting for cooperation management and demonstrates its use for handling instances of these problem domains. The proposed approach is shown to be very flexible, covers a wide range of scenarios, and supports an easy tailoring. In particular, it supports the switching from one cooperation scheme to another, e.g., as a reaction to changing network characteristics, simply by modifying the parameters of the model, avoiding a time and money consuming modification of the implementation