The column protocol: A high availability and low message cost solution for managing replicated data

This paper presents a quorum-based replica control protocol which is resilient to network partitioning. In the best case, the protocol generates quorums of a constant size. When some replicas are inaccessible, the quorum size increases gradually and may be as large as O(n), where n is the number of replicas. However, the expected quorum size is shown to remain constant as n grows. This is a desirable property since the message cost for accessing replicated data is directly proportional to the quorum size. Moreover, the availability of the protocol is shown to be comparably high. With the two properties—constant expected quorum size and comparably high availability—the protocol is thus practical for managing replicated data.