Maintaining consistency within a federation infrastructure

Abstract

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for a joining node to join a ring of nodes within a rendezvous federation. Embodiments of the invention include establishing a neighborhood of multiple nodes on the ring of nodes. The joining node indicates its intent to take id-space ownership for a portion of the id-space between the joining node and a selected immediately adjacent node. The joining node initiates a one-way monitoring relationship with the selected immediately adjacent node. The joining node receiving an indication from the selected immediately adjacent node that indicates acceptance of the joining node's intent to take id-space ownership for a portion of the id-space between the joining node and the selected node and indicates establishment of a one-way monitoring relationship between the selected node and the joining node. The joining node agrees to participate in a one-way monitoring relationship with the selected node.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]The present application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / 936,589, filed Nov. 7, 2007, entitled “MAINTAINING CONSISTENCY WITHIN A FEDERATION INFRASTRUCTURE”, which claims the benefit of and priority to U.S. provisional patent application Ser. No. 60 / 865,136, filed Nov. 9, 2006, entitled “P2P RING OF STORAGE” and is also a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 971,451, filed Oct. 22, 2004, entitled “RENDEZVOUSING RESOURCE REQUESTS WITH CORRESPONDING RESOURCES”. All of the above applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.BACKGROUND[0002]1. Background and Relevant Art[0003]Computer systems and related technology affect many aspects of society. Indeed, the computer system's ability to process information has transformed the way we live and work. Computer systems now commonly perform a host of tasks (e.g., word processing, scheduling, and database management) that ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0018]This Summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This Summary is not inten

Problems solved by technology

However, accessing a network resource can be difficult if a computer system has no prior knowledge of a network address for a network resource.

Each different mechanism may have different coding requirements and may not provide a developer with all the functionality that is needed in an application.

For example, although DNS has a distributed administration architecture (i.e., centralized management is not required), DNS is not sufficiently dynamic, not self-organizing, supports a weak data and query model, and has a fixed set of roots.

Further, aspects of different mechanisms may not be compatible with one another.

For example, a resource identified using DNS may not be compatible with DFS routing protocols.

Thus, a developer may be forced to choose the most suitable mechanism and forgo the advantages of other mechanisms.

Mechanisms for identifying resources can be particularly problematic in peer-to-peer networks.

On larger scale networks where nodes frequently connect and disconnect form the network relying on entry of information is not always practical.

Additionally, DNS is specialized to the task of find hosts or services and is not generally applicable to other types of resources.

Further, since IDs (for at least some of the mechanisms) can be uniformly distributed around a ring, there is always some possibility that routing between nodes on the ring will result in some inefficiency.

Additionally, when message routing involves multiple hops, there is some chance that such events will occur multiple times. Unfortunately, these mechanisms do not take into account the proximity of nodes (physical or otherwise) with respect one another.

Unfortunately, these existing mechanisms typically do not provide for, among other things, symmetric relationships between nodes (i.e., if a first node considers a second node to be its partner, the second node considers the first node as a partner as well), routing messages in both directions (clockwise and counterclockwise) on a ring, partitioning linked lists of nodes based on a plurality of proximity metrics, and routing messages based on a plurality of proximity metrics.

These deficiencies can limit dynamic, distributed, and efficient transfer of data between nodes of a network, such as, for example, when broadcasting data to all nodes of the network.

Unfortunately, many existing asynchronous systems provide only limited safety and liveness mechanisms.

For example, some asynchronous systems provide only eventually safety and liveness.

Thus, these asynchronous systems are not suitable for various types of applications, such as, for example, authoritative storage.

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