A New Fully-Distributed Arbitration-Based Membership Protocol

Recently, a new class of "arbitrator-based" membership protocols have been proposed. These claim to provide time bounds on how long membership lists can stay inconsistent-this property is critical in many distributed applications which need to take timely recovery actions. In this paper, we: 1) present the first fully decentralized and stabilizing version of membership protocols in this class; 2) formally prove properties and claims about both our decentralized version and the original protocol; and 3) present experimental results from both a simulation and a real cluster implementation.