MUREX: A mutable replica control scheme for structured peer-to-peer storage systems

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose MUREX, a mutable replica control scheme, to keep one-copy equivalence for synchronous replication in structured peer-to-peer (P2P) storage systems. Design/methodology/approach: For synchronous replication in P2P networks, it is proper to adopt crash-recovery as the fault model; that is, nodes are fail-stop and can recover and rejoin the system after synchronizing their states with other active nodes. In addition to the state synchronization problem, the paper identifies other two problems to solve for synchronous replication in P2P storage systems. They are the replica acquisition and the replica migration problems. Findings: On the basis of multi-column read/write quorums, MUREX conquers the problems by the replica pointer, the on-demand replica regeneration, and the leased lock techniques. Originality/value: The paper proves the correctness of MUREX, analyzes and also simulates it in terms of communication cost and operation success rate.