Dynamic and fault-tolerant cluster management

Recent decentralised event-based systems have focused on providing event delivery which scales with increasing number of processes. While the main focus of research has been on ensuring that processes maintain only a small amount of information on maintaining membership and routing, an important factor in achieving scalability for event-based peer-to-peer dissemination system is the number of events disseminated at the same time. This work presents a dynamic and fault tolerant cluster management method which can be used to coordinate concurrent access to resources in a peer-to-peer system. In the context of event-based dissemination systems the cluster management can be used to control the number of concurrently disseminated events. We present and analyse an algorithm implementing the proposed cluster management model in a fault-tolerant and decentralised way. The algorithm provides for each cluster a limited set of tickets. A process which has obtained a ticket may send events corresponding to the resources of the cluster. The algorithm guarantees that no two processes ever issue an event corresponding to the same ticket at the same time. The cluster management model on its own has interesting properties which can be useful for many peer-to-peer applications.