Abstract: Light-Weight Currency Management Mechanisms in Deno
This paper discusses the currency management mechanisms used in Deno, a
replicated-object storage sys-tem designed for use in mobile and
weakly-connected environments. Deno primarily differs from previous work in
implementing an asynchronous weighted-voting scheme via epidemic
information flow, and in committing updates in an entirely decentralized
fashion, without requiring any server to have complete knowledge of system
membership.
We first give an overview of Deno, briefly discussing its voting scheme,
proxy mechanism, basic API, and commit performance. We then present
currency management mechanisms, based on peer-to-peer currency exchanges,
that enable light-weight replica creation, retirement, and currency
redistribution while main-taining protocol correctness. We also demonstrate
that peer-to-peer exchanges can be used to exponen-tially converge to
arbitrary target currency distributions.