Analysis and Design of DOORS, in the Context of Consistency, Availability, Partitioning and Latency

Abstract

DOORS is a distributed system proposal that provides execution and storage services in the form of "objects", which encapsulate both state and behaviour. We start by briefly describing the current state of the DOORS solution, as detailed in previous work. We then outline the class of problems that we aim to solve with DOORS, and provide brief motivations for the architectural choices. As direct consequences of the chosen architecture (distributed message passing in favour of shared memory) we analyse the following critical aspects: concurrency control, replication and the choice between consistency and availability. With the support of this analysis, we identify and present 3 different "kinds" of inter-node communication. In spite of their apparent similarity, these scenarios are addressed differently into the design, such that the implementation of DOORS remains correct, consistent and useful.