OPTIMAL TERMINATION PROTOCOLS FOR NETWORK PARTITIONING.

Abstract

Commit protocols guarantee the consistency of distributed databases in absence of any failures. A commit protocol is resilient to a class of failures if it is possible to guarantee that a) databases at all operational sites in presence of these failures are consistent and b) other sites can be recovered consistently with these sites when the failure is repaired. It is proved that quorum-based termination protocols perform very well in the presence of network partitioning. If the central site is reliable, we can prove that centralized commit protocols indeed perform better than all decentralized ones. Thus, the general preference for centralized commit protocols is justified.