Vertical Atomic Broadcast and Passive Replication (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces Vertical Atomic Broadcast, a protocol for reconfigurable atomic broadcast that minimizes downtime during reconfiguration, supporting both active and passive fault-tolerant replication.

Contribution

It presents a complete specification and a novel protocol for reconfigurable atomic broadcast with reduced downtime, applicable to passive and active replication.

Findings

Reduces system downtime during reconfiguration

Supports reconfiguration while processing messages

Maintains safety and liveness in dynamic environments

Abstract

Atomic broadcast is a reliable communication abstraction ensuring that all processes deliver the same set of messages in a common global order. It is a fundamental building block for implementing fault-tolerant services using either active (aka state-machine) or passive (aka primary-backup) replication. We consider the problem of implementing reconfigurable atomic broadcast, which further allows users to dynamically alter the set of participating processes, e.g., in response to failures or changes in the load. We give a complete safety and liveness specification of this communication abstraction and propose a new protocol implementing it, called Vertical Atomic Broadcast, which uses an auxiliary service to facilitate reconfiguration. In contrast to prior proposals, our protocol significantly reduces system downtime when reconfiguring from a functional configuration by allowing it to continue processing messages while agreement on the next configuration is in progress. Furthermore, we show that this advantage can be maintained even when our protocol is modified to support a stronger variant of atomic broadcast required for passive replication.