An efficient communication structure for distributed commit protocols

• Published in: IEEE journal on selected areas in communications Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. 375 - 389
• Main Authors: Ghafoor, A., Berra, P.B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01-04-1989; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Application software; Applied sciences; Banking; Channel capacity; Computer science; control theory; systems; Distributed computing; Distributed databases; Exact sciences and technology; Information systems. Data bases; Memory organisation. Data processing; Protocols; Robustness; Routing; Software; Telecommunication computing; Transaction databases; Complexity measurement; Distributed database; Algorithm; Transmission protocol
• ISSN: 0733-8716; 1558-0008
• DOI: 10.1109/49.16870

To maintain consistency in a distributed database environment, the transactions must be executed atomically. The standard algorithm for ensuring an atomic execution is called the distributed commit protocol. The two-phase commit protocol and its variations, the well-known protocols used for this purpose, are characterized by successive rounds of message exchange, among all the sites of the database, at the time a transaction enters into a completion phase. The performance of these protocols is given by a complexity measure that depends on the communication structure of the protocol. Given N sites, the worst-case complexity of a commit protocol is O(N/sup 2/). A communication structure called maximal binomial structure (MBS) is presented, for which the complexity of the protocol is O(N*log/sup 3/ N). A lower bound for this complexity is also given, which is O(N*log/sup 2/ N). Protocols using the MBS remain symmetric. A scheme for an arbitrary expansion of the MBS to allow communication among a large number of sites is proposed. For the expanded system, the protocol complexity is also shown to be O(N*log/sup 3/ N). These structures are shown to be superior to other known structures.< >