Vote assignments in weighted voting mechanisms

Majority voting is commonly used in distributed computing systems to control mutual exclusion, and in fault-tolerant computing to achieve reliability. Different vote assignments may result in different reliabilities. The authors present vote assignment algorithms aimed at maximizing the reliability. In their approach the voting weight assigned to each node is readily determined if the link failure rate is negligible. For systems having imperfect links a heuristic algorithm is proposed. Simulation studies show that the algorithm can approximate optimal assignments quite well in small systems