The triangular lattice protocol: a highly fault tolerant and highly efficient protocol for replicated data

A protocol for managing replicated data in which data copies are organized as a triangular lattice is introduced. The smallest quorum size is O(√N), where N is the number of data copies, which is currently considered optimal for a fully distributed environment. The protocol has the property of graceful degradation. The quorum sizes increase gradually as data copy failures increase. The protocol also has the property of asymptotically high availability, i.e., the availability approaches 1 as the number of data copies goes to ∞ if the probability that a data copy available is greater than 0.5