Static and dynamic adaptation of transactional consistency

Consistency criteria adopted for the management of persistent replicated objects in a distributed system define the degree of concurrency allowed among operations accessing objects. Several notions of consistency are known from the literature; among them are causal consistency, causal serializability, and serializability. We propose a generalizing algorithm for concurrency control in a transaction system that exhibits a clean separation between policy and mechanism. A consistency criterion selected is manifested as a set of rules forming the policy. The mechanism however, remains unchanged regardless of the currently used policy. It implements causally consistent message delivery and uses tokens and quorums of tokens to enforce access operation ordering according to the specified consistency criterion. An example of an application exploiting the advantages of dynamically switching among various consistency criteria concludes the paper