The maintenance of common data in a distributed system

Abstract

A basic task in distributed computation is the maintenance at each processor of the network, of a current and accurate copy of a common database. Such a database must be updated in the wake of locally generated changes to its contents. Due to previous disconnections of parts of the network, a maintenance protocol may need to update processors holding widely varying versions of the database. A deterministic protocol, which has only polylogarithmic overhead in its time and communication complexities, is provided for this problem. Previous deterministic solutions required polynomial overhead in at least one of these measures.<>