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Middleware extensions that trade consistency for availability
Author(s) -
Asplund Mikael,
NadjmTehrani Simin,
Zagar Klemen
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.1383
Subject(s) - consistency (knowledge bases) , partition (number theory) , computer science , middleware (distributed applications) , distributed computing , common object request broker architecture , consistency model , network partition , distributed object , data consistency , eventual consistency , high availability , computer network , mathematics , combinatorics , artificial intelligence
Replicated distributed object systems are deployed to provide timely and reliable services to actors at distributed locations. This paper treats applications in which data updates are dependent on satisfaction of integrity constraints over multiple objects. Network partitions, caused by occasional link failures, overload or attacks create problems in keeping both consistency and availability in such networks. We propose a means of achieving higher availability by providing partition‐awareness in middleware. The general approach has been illustrated by implementing a number of CORBA extensions that trade consistency for availability during network partitions. This paper contains a thorough experimental evaluation that presents the gains and costs of our approach. The experiments clearly illustrate the benefit of our protocols in terms of significantly higher availability and the number of performed operations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.