Quorum systems are commonly used to maintain the consistency of replicated data in a distributed system. Much research has been devoted to developing quorum systems with good theoretical properties, such as fault tolerance and high availability. However, even given a theoretically good quorum system, it is not obvious how to efficiently deploy such a system in a real network. This paper introduces a new combinatorial optimization problem, the Quorum Deployment Problem, and studies its complexity. We demonstrate that it is NP-hard to approximate the Quorum Deployment Problem within any factor of n δ, where n is the number of nodes in the distributed network and δ > 0. The problem is NP-hard in even the simplest possible distributed network: a one-dimensional line with metric cost. We begin to study algorithms for variants of the problem. Some variants can be solved optimally in polynomial time and some NP-hard variants can be approximated to within a constant factor. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.
CITATION STYLE
Gilbert, S., & Malewicz, G. (2005). The Quorum Deployment Problem. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 3544, pp. 316–330). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/11516798_23
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.