Scalable and dynamic quorum systems

Abstract

We investigate issues related to the probe complexity of quorum systems and their implementation in a dynamic environment. Our contribution is twofold. The first regards the algorithmic complexity of finding a quorum in case of random failures. We show a tradeoff between the load of a quorum system and its probe complexity for non adaptive algorithms. We analyze the algorithmic probe complexity of the Paths quorum system suggested by Naor and Wool in [18], and present two optimal algorithms. The first is a non adaptive algorithm that matches our lower bound. The second is an adaptive algorithm with a probe complexity that is linear in the minimum between the size of the smallest quorum set and the inverse of the load of the system. We supply a constant degree network in which these algorithms could be executed efficiently. Thus the Paths quorum system is shown to have good balance between many measures of quality. Our second contribution is presenting Dynamic Paths-a suggestion for a dynamic and scalable quorum system, which can operate in an environment where elements join and leave the system. The quorum system could be viewed as a dynamic adaptation of the Paths system, and therefore has low load high availability and good probe complexity. We show that it scales gracefully as the number of elements grows.