Fault Tolerant Object Replication Algorithm

This report describes a Fault Tolerant Object Replication Algorithm. The algorithm (protocol) uses Master/Slave configuration for replica consistency and fault tolerance. The novelty of this protocol is that, it is specified and implemented using only Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). Lower layer (level) message passing mechanism is not used (which is usually difficult to implement and not easily portable on heterogeneous systems). To our knowledge this is the first protocol that is specified in terms of RPC only. This makes the implementation of the protocol very simple. Also the implementation is portable on heterogeneous systems which support a common RPC mechanism (like the DCE RPC). Another interesting feature of this protocol is that it is self contained. It does not assume the existence of any lower level reliable (like reliable communication of reliable group membership) services. However it assumes simple timeout mechanism for failure detection. The report also presents the proof..