Voting with bystanders

A voting protocol overcoming the usual requirements of a minimum number of three copies to be of any practical use and relatively high number of read and write requests is presented. It provides a significant amount of fault-tolerance with as few as two replicas. This protocol, voting with bystanders (VWB), applies to all networks consisting of local area network segments that are immune to partial failures linked by gateways that might fail. A stochastic analysis of the protocol under general Markovian assumptions is presented showing that VWB provides excellent read availabilities and good write availabilities with as few as two or three replicas.<>