3 research outputs found
Contention management for distributed data replication
PhD ThesisOptimistic replication schemes provide distributed applications with access
to shared data at lower latencies and greater availability. This is
achieved by allowing clients to replicate shared data and execute actions
locally. A consequence of this scheme raises issues regarding shared data
consistency. Sometimes an action executed by a client may result in
shared data that may conflict and, as a consequence, may conflict with
subsequent actions that are caused by the conflicting action. This requires
a client to rollback to the action that caused the conflicting data,
and to execute some exception handling. This can be achieved by relying
on the application layer to either ignore or handle shared data inconsistencies
when they are discovered during the reconciliation phase of an
optimistic protocol.
Inconsistency of shared data has an impact on the causality relationship
across client actions. In protocol design, it is desirable to preserve the
property of causality between different actions occurring across a distributed
application. Without application level knowledge, we assume
an action causes all the subsequent actions at the same client. With
application knowledge, we can significantly ease the protocol burden of
provisioning causal ordering, as we can identify which actions do not
cause other actions (even if they precede them). This, in turn, makes
possible the client’s ability to rollback to past actions and to change
them, without having to alter subsequent actions. Unfortunately, increased
instances of application level causal relations between actions
lead to a significant overhead in protocol. Therefore, minimizing the
rollback associated with conflicting actions, while preserving causality,
is seen as desirable for lower exception handling in the application layer.
In this thesis, we present a framework that utilizes causality to create
a scheduler that can inform a contention management scheme to reduce
the rollback associated with the conflicting access of shared data.
Our framework uses a backoff contention management scheme to provide
causality preserving for those optimistic replication systems with high
causality requirements, without the need for application layer knowledge.
We present experiments which demonstrate that our framework reduces
clients’ rollback and, more importantly, that the overall throughput of
the system is improved when the contention management is used with
applications that require causality to be preserved across all actions
Using distributed consistent branching for efficient Reconciliation Of Mobile workspaces
Optimistic replication allows mobile workspaces to remain accessible during interrupted network access, but require consecutive handling of any conflicts. When conflict handling requires manual intervention by the user, the system must not require that conflicts are resolved immediatley after their detection. We present a log-based algorithm for reconciling changes to replicated data that supports deferred manual conflict resolution, while sharing the favorable scalability properties of log-based approaches of small storage and communication overhead. Simulation results validate our design and show that it compares favorably in the relevant metrics with version vector-based designs