Self-Stabilizing Passive Replication for Internet Service Platforms

We present a self-stabilizing passive replication mechanism for Internet service platforms. The proposed system based on this mechanism aims to provide services despite simultaneous failure of the majority of nodes. To achieve this objective, we use the self- stabilizing consensus algorithm introduced by Dolev et al., instead of a majority-based consensus algorithm such as Paxos. Although our system allows temporary illegal behavior, it eventually converges on the desired state without interruption of services. Thus, the proposed system is useful for providing services that require high availability, but not strict consistency, a prime example of which is an Internet bulletin board for communication during large-scale natural disasters. We implemented a prototype and evaluated it with experiments to demonstrate availability through various patterns of failures.