Performance of mobile, single-object, replication protocols

This paper discusses the implementation and performance of bounded voting: a new object replication protocol designed for use in mobile and weakly-connected environments. We show that the protocol eliminates several restrictions of previous work, such as the need for (1) strong or complete connectivity, (2) complete knowledge of system membership, and (3) low update rates. The protocol implements an asynchronous, weighted-voting scheme via epidemic information flow, and commits updates in an entirely decentralized fashion. A proxy mechanism is used to enable transparent handling of planned disconnections. We use a detailed simulation study to characterize the performance of bounded voting under a variety of loads and environment, and to compare it to another decentralized epidemic protocol. We further investigate the performance impact of the proxy mechanism.