Conflict-free Collaborative Set Sharing for Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new conflict-free collaborative set sharing scheme for distributed systems that allows both insertions and deletions, offering an alternative to traditional CRDTs with more operational flexibility.

Contribution

It proposes a novel synchronization method enabling conflict-free set sharing with full operation support, advancing the design of conflict-free replicated data types.

Findings

Allows both insertion and deletion operations in conflict-free sets

Provides a new synchronization approach for distributed data sharing

Offers insights that could replace CRDTs in certain applications

Abstract

Collaborative Data Sharing is widely noticed to be essential for distributed systems. Among several proposed strategies, conflict-free techniques are considered useful for serverless concurrent systems. They aim at making shared data be consistent between peers in such a way that their local data do not become equal at once, but they arrive at the same data eventually when no updates occur in any peer. Although the Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) approach could be used in data sharing as well, it puts restrictions on available operations so as to concurrent updates never cause conflicts. Even for sets, popular operations such as insertion and deletion are not freely used, for example. We propose a novel scheme for Conflict-free Collaborative Set Sharing that allows both insertion and deletion operations. It will provide a new synchronization method for data sharing and gives a fresh insight into designing conflict-free replicated data types. We might consider that this becomes a substitute for CRDTs.