A principle for resilient sharing of distributed resources

Abstract

A technique is described which permits distributed resources to be shared (services to be offered) in a resilient manner. The essence of the technique is to a priori declare one of the server hosts primary and the others backups. Any of the servers can perform the primary duties. Thus the role of primary can migrate around the set of servers. The concept of n-host resiliency is introduced and the error detection and recovery schemes for two-host resiliency are presented. The single primary, multiple backup technique for resource sharing is shown to have minimal delay. In the general case, this is superior to multiple primary techniques.