A case study of agreement problems in distributed systems: non-blocking atomic commitment

Abstract

The paper considers an agreement problem whose practical interest is well known, namely the Non-Blocking Atomic Commitment Problem. First, a generic protocol solving this problem is given and then instantiations of its generic statements are provided for both synchronous and asynchronous distributed systems. These instantiations use a few basic components: timeout mechanism and reliable multicast primitives for synchronous systems unreliable failure detectors and a solution to the consensus problem for asynchronous systems. So, the article can also be considered as an introduction to state of the art concepts and protocols for distributed fault tolerance.