An efficient protocol for voting in distributed systems

A voting protocol that can reduce the communication costs in distributed systems significantly is proposed. The technique arranges nodes in small intersecting groups, such that a site, in absence of failures, needs to communicate only with members of its group to collect the quorum. A method for constructing such logical groups is presented. It is shown that the message overhead of any operation in a system of N nodes is O( square root N) when there are no or few failures in the system. The availability and the communication overheads of the proposed protocol are compared with those of existing protocols.<
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