On Liveness of Dynamic Storage

Dynamic distributed storage algorithms such as DynaStore, Reconfigurable Paxos, RAMBO, and RDS, do not ensure liveness (wait-freedom) in asynchronous runs with infinitely many reconfigurations. We prove that this is inherent for asynchronous dynamic storage algorithms. Our result holds even if only one process may fail, provided that machines that were successfully removed from the system’s configuration can be switched off by a system administrator. To circumvent this result, we define a dynamic eventually perfect failure detector, and present an algorithm that uses it to emulate wait-free dynamic atomic storage. Though some of the previous algorithms have been designed for eventually synchronous models, to the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to ensure liveness for all operations without restricting the reconfiguration rate.

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