Resilient Objects in Broadcast Networks

An object is said to be resilient if operations on the object can be performed even if some nodes of the network fail. To support resiliency, copies of the objects are stored on different nodes, and access to different copies is coordinated. The properties of broadcast networks are utilized to devise a distributed scheme for implementing resilient objects. All the copies of an object are equivalent. If an operation is requested on an object, the operation is performed on all the copies of the object. No special mechanisms are needed if some copies are not available due to node failures, as long as there is at least one active node that has a copy of the object and the network does not get partitioned. Simulation results indicate that the number of messages needed to perform an operation increases slowly and the response time for performing an operation decreases as the number of copies increases. >