Optimal replica control protocols for ring networks

Distributed computing environments are expected to offer highly available services. Replication of data is one of the main techniques used to achieve this goal. Protocols that achieve optimal performance in replicating data for ring networks are discussed. Coteries, proposed by H. Garcia-Molina and D. Barbara (1985), provide the most general framework for analyzing static pessimistic protocols. It is shown that a simple voting scheme, a very small class of the coterie scheme, provides optimal performance for several variations of the ring interconnection topology