Versioning Distributed Transactions for Dynamic Component Reconfiguration

Dynamic reconfiguration enables components of a distributed system to be updated without restarting the whole system. One major challenge of this technology lies in how to preserve the system consistency while minimizing the disruption. Ma et al. proposed an approach to meet the challenge by managing runtime dependencies among components. However, this approach puts heavy burden on network communication as it requires components to send out every dependency changing event in each ongoing transaction, which is unnecessary in the concurrent environment. In this paper, we propose a transaction-versioning approach that identifies correct version of components for all ongoing transactions. The process can be completed within one single round of message changing among involved components. Comparing with Ma's approach, the communication overhead of our approach is linear with the system scale, which is greatly reduced especially when multiple transactions are running on the system, while the timeliness is not affected. Extensive experiments through simulation show the correctness and efficiency of our approach.