Database Replication Using Epidemic Communication

There is a growing interest in asynchronous replica management protocols in which database transactions are executed locally, and their effects are incorporated asynchronously on remote database copies. In this paper we investigate an epidemic update protocol that guarantees consistency and serializability in spite of a write-anywhere capability and conduct simulation experiments to evaluate this protocol. Our results indicate that this epidemic approach is indeed a viable alternative to eager update protocols for a distributed database environment where serializability is needed.