General Structured Voting: A Flexible Framework for Modelling Cooperations

Data replication schemes and mutual exclusion protocols can be regarded as special instances of cooperation schemes, which describe the interaction of independent nodes within a computer network in order to achieve a common goal. This paper presents a new mechanism called General Structured Voting for cooperation management and demonstrates its use for handling instances of these problem domains. The proposed approach is shown to be very exible, covers a wide range of scenarios and supports an easy tailoring. In particular, it supports the switching from one cooperation scheme to another e.g. as a reaction of changing network characteristics simply by modifying the parameters of the model, avoiding a time and money consuming modiication of the implementation.