Timed Quorum System for Large-Scale and Dynamic Environments

Abstract: This paper presents Timed Quorum System (TQS), a new quorum system especially suited for large-scale and dynamic systems. TQS requires that two quorums intersect with high probability if they are used in the same small period of time. It proposed an algorithm that implements TQS and that verifies probabilistic atomicity: a consistency criterion that requires each operation to respect atomicity with high probability. This TQS implementation has quorum of size O(\sqrt{nD}) and expected access time of O(log \sqrt{nD}) message delays, where n measures the size of the system and D is a required parameter to handle dynamism.