How to design optimistic operations for peer-to-peer replication

Abstract

As collaboration over the Internet becomes an everyday affair, it is increasingly important to provide high quality of interactivity. Distributed applications can replicate collaborative objects at every site for the purpose of achieving high interactivity. Replication, however, has a fatal weakness that it is difficult to maintain consistency among replicas. This paper introduces operation commutativity as a key principle in designing operations in order to manage distributed replicas consistent. In addition, we suggest effective schemes that make operations commutative using the relations of objects and operations. Finally, we apply our approaches to some simple replicated abstract data types, and achieve their consistency without serialization and locking.