A new quorum-based replica control protocol

Data replication is an important issue in distributed systems. Many protocols are designed to achieve high availability, but some of them have restrictions on N, the number of nodes in the system. This motivates us to design a protocol suitable for arbitrary N. In this paper, we present a new quorum-based replica control protocol whose quorum size is O(/spl radic//N), which is the same as that of the grid protocol. Moreover; the proposed protocol is almost symmetric, i.e., each node nearly bears the same responsibility. In particular, our protocol performs well in systems where read operations are requested more frequently than write ones.