Communication complexity of atomic commitment and of gossiping

Ouri Wolfson, Adrian Segall

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

The problem of atomic commitment of a transaction in a distributed database is considered. This is a variant of the famous gossiping problem. Given a set of communication costs between pairs of participant sites, it is established that the necessary communication cost for any atomic commitment algorithm is twice the cost of a certain minimum spanning tree. This paper establishes the necessary communication time for any atomic commitment algorithm, given a set of communication delays between pairs of participant sites, and the time at which each participant completes its subtransaction. Then, it is determined that both lower bounds are also upper bounds in the following sense. A simple, linear time, distributed algorithm, called TREE-COMMIT, whose communication complexity is not worse than p times the minimum complexity, where p is the number of participants, is presented. It is demonstrated that TREE-COMMIT is superior to the existing variants of the two-phase commit protocol.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)423-450
Number of pages28
JournalSIAM Journal on Computing
Volume20
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1991
Externally publishedYes

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