A Scalable Architecture for Maintaining Referential Integrity in Distributed Information Systems

Abstract

One of the problems that we experience with today's most widespread Internet Information Systems (like WWW or Gopher) is the lack of support for maintaining referential integrity. Whenever a resource is (re)moved, dangling references from other resources may occur. This paper presents a scalable architecture for automatic maintenance of referential integrity in large (thousands of servers) distributed information systems. A central feature of the proposed architecture is the p-flood algorithm, which is a scalable, robust, prioritizable, probabilistic server-server protocol for efficient distribution of update information to a large collection of servers. The p-flood algorithm is now implemented in the Hyper-G system, but may in principle also be implemented as an add-on for existing WWW and Gopher servers.