Coterie templates: a new quorum construction method

One approach to distributed mutual exclusion algorithms is the use of quorums. Quorum-based algorithms offer the advantage of protocol symmetry, spreading effort and responsibility uniformly across the distributed system. In this paper, we present an O(logn) algorithm to generate coterie templates of near-optimal O(n/sup 0.63/) size. Coterie templates are generic quorum structures that exhibit several desirable properties such as fault tolerance, symmetry and low storage cost. In addition, coteries can be instantiated from the template to reflect desirable network characteristics.