Auxiliary Consensus in Distributed Systems for Fault-Tolerant Operation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional distributed systems face challenges in improving fault tolerance while maintaining low operational costs, as they require additional servers to handle failures, leading to increased costs and inefficiencies.
Innovation Solution
Incorporating an auxiliary consensus device that assists in data consensus processing during failures, allowing the system to continue operation by prioritizing the auxiliary consensus decided value over the original distributed consensus algorithm's value, thus reducing the total number of required bases and minimizing resource usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If more server apparatuses are added to the distributed system to improve fault tolerance, then the system can tolerate more failures, but the cost and device complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
An auxiliary consensus device is introduced as an intermediary component that assists the distributed consensus algorithm during failure conditions. This mediator provides backup consensus capabilities without requiring a full duplicate server apparatus, thereby improving fault tolerance while minimizing the increase in device complexity
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of maintaining complete redundant server apparatuses for all failure scenarios, the system implements partial redundancy through the auxiliary consensus device that activates only when failures occur. This allows the system to tolerate a certain number of failures without permanently maintaining the excessive resources needed to handle all possible failure combinations
2Device complexity
If the number of server apparatuses is reduced to lower costs, then device complexity decreases, but fault tolerance deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The auxiliary consensus device is pre-configured with the capability to assist in consensus decisions before failures occur. This preliminary preparation ensures that when failures happen, the system can immediately utilize the pre-positioned auxiliary device without needing to provision additional server apparatuses, maintaining fault tolerance with reduced device complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The auxiliary consensus device serves as a cost-effective intermediary that provides the necessary consensus support during failures without requiring a full complement of redundant server apparatuses, thereby achieving acceptable fault tolerance at lower device complexity
Data Source
AI summary
A distributed consensus method for performing data consensus processing in a distributed system that couples one or more client apparatuses and a plurality of server apparatuses via a network, the method including a step in which each server apparatus performs data operation according to a predetermined distributed consensus algorithm, a step in which an auxiliary consensus device, which is an auxiliary device that assists in reaching a consensus in the event of a failure in response to a request from each server apparatus, decides an auxiliary consensus decided value, and a step in which the auxiliary consensus decided value is caused to take precedence over the decided value of the distributed consensus algorithm under conditions under which the auxiliary consensus decided value decided by the auxiliary consensus device and the decided value decided by the distributed consensus algorithm can conflict with each other.