Agreeing to agree: conflict resolution for optimistically replicated data

Current techniques for reconciling disconnected changes to optimistically replicated data often use version vectors or related mechanisms to track causal histories. This allows the system to tell whether the value at one replica dominates another or whether the two replicas are in conflict. However, current algorithms do not provide entirely satisfactory ways of repairing conflicts. The usual approach is to introduce fresh events into the causal history, even in situations where the causally independent values at the two replicas are actually equal. In some scenarios these events may later conflict with each other or with further updates, slowing or even preventing convergence of the whole system.

To address this issue, we enrich the set of possible actions at a replica to include a notion of explicit conflict resolution between existing events, where the user at a replica declares that one set of events dominates another, or that a set of events are equivalent. We precisely specify the behavior of this refined replication framework from a user's point of view and show that, if communication is assumed to be “reciprocal” (with pairs of replicas exchanging information about their current states), then this specification can be implemented by an algorithm with the property that the information stored at any replica and the sizes of the messages sent between replicas are bounded by a polynomial function of the number of replicas in the system.