SOQ: A Service-Oriented Quorum-Based Protocol for Resilient Real-Time Communication in Partitionable Networks

Abstract

We consider efficient real-time communication mechanisms for applications in unreliable and partitionable networks. Utilizing quorum systems, we present a quorum based protocol called SOQ to let nodes update and query service information to a selected set of servers (a quorum). Due to the intersection property of quorums, nodes can obtain latest updated information by simply accessing a quorum. To make the protocol adaptive to network partitions, we propose update/query triggering mechanisms to determine when nodes trigger updates/queries. A quorum access strategy for nodes to judiciously select a quorum to access is designed so that the probability that a query returns the latest service information is maximized. We give in-depth analysis of the protocol, including the communication overhead, load and availability relationship of quorum systems and timeliness analysis of distributed applications. Our experimental studies show that SOQ is resilient to network partitions without incurring large overheads.