PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF AN ENHANCED-SECURITY DISTRIBUTED VOTING ALGORITHM

摘要

An important consideration of any computer system design is performance. Fault-tolerant distributed system designs are particularly troublesome from a performance standpoint because while they possess inherent redundancy that lends itself to fault tolerance, the overhead necessitated by the communication among these redundant elements will negatively impact performance. For example, in distributed voting algorithms where the processors exchange their individual results, determination of a majority may be through a non-trivial analysis of the votes. Distributed voting algorithms using the predominate two-phase commit protocol not only expend considerable time during costly vote comparisons, but each processor must shares its vote with every other processor prior to a majority result being committed. An alternative distributed voting algorithm is presented that is a radical departure from the classic two-phase commit protocol. The analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm, when compared with the state-of-the art, will not suffer any loss in fault coverage while simultaneously yielding both a security benefit and a gain in performance.