Increasing Availability by Sacrificing Data Integrity - A Problem Statement

Distributed software systems are the basis for innovative applications (e.g. pervasive computing, telecommunication services, and control engineering). The key for achieving scalable and maintainable distributed systems is dependability, because otherwise the complexity of distribution would leave the system uncontrollable. Hence, our approach aims at a concept for optimizing dependability. We present a research project and contribute with reasons motivating the relevance of our objective by showing real-life application scenarios and by analyzing relevant related work. Further, we contribute with our solution approach and the key idea: Similar to other approaches we use replication as means to provide transparent fault-tolerance and persistence, but we are especially focused on increasing availability by relaxing data integrity using a mixture of asynchronous and synchronous replication techniques.