Virtual subnet agreement protocol in a cloud storage environment

Abstract

Fault-tolerance is an important research topic in the study of distributed systems. In a distributed system, cooperating tasks must achieve an agreement. This is to cope with the influence of faulty components. Reaching a common agreement in the presence of faults before performing certain tasks is essential. Nowadays, network bandwidth and hardware technology are developing rapidly, resulting in the vigorous development of the internet. However, cloud computing, an internet-based development in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the internet has become a significant issue. In addition, the Byzantine Agreement (BA) problem is a fundamental problem in fault-tolerant distribute systems. In previous studies, the BA algorithm was used in traditional network topology. However, this algorithm does not perform well in dynamically changing networks. To enhance fault-tolerance, a new protocol VSACS (virtual subnet agreement of cloud storage) is proposed to solve the BA problem in this study. VSACS uses the minimum number of message exchange rounds to make all correct processors agree on a common value and can tolerate the maximum number of allowable faulty components.