Majority Quorum Protocol Dedicated to General Threshold Schemes

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a majority quorum system dedicated to p-m-n general threshold schemes where p, n and m are respectively the minimal number of chunks that provide some information (but not necessarily all) on the original data, the total number of nodes in which the chunks of an object are stored and the minimal number of nodes needed to retrieve the original data using this protocol. In other words, less than p chunks reveal absolutely no information about the original data and less than m chunks can't reconstruct the original data. The p-m-n general threshold schemes optimize the usage of storage resources by reducing the total size of data to write and ensure fault-tolerance up to (n - m) nodes failure. With such a data distribution, a specific value of m can be set to have a good trade off between resources utilization and fault-tolerance. The only drawback of such schemes is the lack of any consistency protocol. If fact, consistency protocols like classical majority quorum are based on full replication. To successfully read or write a data using the majority quorum protocol, an absolute majority of replicas must be read / written correctly. This condition ensures that any read and write operations will contain at least one common replica, which guarantees their consistency. However, when a threshold scheme is used, an adaptation is needed. In fact, classical majority quorum protocol can no longer ensure that m chunks will have the latest version when [n/2] + 1 <; m ≤ n. In this paper, we introduce a new majority quorum protocol dedicated to general threshold schemes. As for the classical majority quorum protocol, the complexity of the quorum size of our protocol is O(n) but the utilization of storage resources is greatly optimized.