Abstract
What happens if a single server is no longer powerful enough to service all your customers? The obvious choice is to add more servers and to use the majority approach (e.g. Paxos, Chapter 2) to guarantee consistency. However, even if you buy one million servers, a client still has to access more than half of them per request! While you gain fault-tolerance, your efficiency can at most be doubled. Do we have to give up on consistency?
Let us take a step back: We used majorities because majority sets always overlap. But are majority sets the only sets that guarantee overlap? In this chapter we study the theory behind overlapping sets, known as quorum systems.
Let us take a step back: We used majorities because majority sets always overlap. But are majority sets the only sets that guarantee overlap? In this chapter we study the theory behind overlapping sets, known as quorum systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Distributed Ledger Technology : The Science of the Blockchain |
| Editors | Roger Wattenhofer |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Publisher | Inverted Forest Publishing |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Pages | 87-104 |
| Chapter | 7 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1544232102, 1544232101 |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 |