Voting with regenerable volatile witnesses

Voting protocols ensure the consistency of replicated objects by requiring all read and write requests to collect an appropriate quorum of replicas. It is proposed to replace some of these replicas with volatile witnesses that have no data and require no stable storage, and to regenerate them instead of waiting for recovery. The small size of volatile witnesses allows them to be regenerated much easier than full replicas. Regeneration attempts are also much more likely to succeed since volatile witnesses can be stored on diskless sites. It is shown that under standard Markovian assumptions two full replicas and one regenerable volatile witness managed by a two-tier dynamic voting protocol provide a higher data availability than three full replicas managed by majority consensus voting or optimistic dynamic voting provided site failures can be detected significantly faster than they can be repaired.<<ETX>>