In Proceeding of the European Research Seminar in Advanced Distributed Systems (ERSADS'97), Zinal (Valais, Switzerland), March 17-21, 1997.
However, in asynchronous environments prone to machines and communication link failures, disconnected replicas may find themselves with different states. The State Transfer problem is to bring such replicas to a consistent state when they re-connect again. Our work presents an efficient State Transfer layer that may serve as a building block in consistent object replication protocols.
The traditional Virtual Synchrony model does not provide sufficient services and guarantees in order to implement the State Transfer layer efficiently. Our solution is based on utilizing the notions of hidden membership and transitional set, which were proposed as basic concepts of the Extended Virtual Synchrony model. In this paper we further elaborate the definitions of hidden membership and transitional set in order to shed light on the subtle aspects of membership service in partitionable environments.
Currently, the protocol is implemented as part of the group membership of Transis communication system.
Technical Report CS98-12, Institute of Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, August 1998.