Synchronizing state with strong similarity between local and remote systems

  • Authors:
  • Cedric Westphal

  • Affiliations:
  • Huawei, Santa Clara, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the third ACM workshop on Mobile cloud computing and services
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Distributed systems such as a mobile device and its cloud storage have a strongly similar state: they are periodically synchronized, but evolve independently in between the synchronization events, sometimes in a disconnected manner that makes keeping the state consistent at both end difficult. This scenario appears in a wide range of situations, between a mobile device application and its server, in database situations. Another context is that of two routers which see similar traffic to populate their route tables and want to exchange these route tables. In all these cases, we need to periodically synchronize a local state and a remote state at the minimum possible cost in terms of bandwidth in between the two synchronization points. We consider a simple distributed source coding approach to the problem of efficient set reconciliation to support the exchange of this highly correlated caching information between a local and a remote system. We show theoretically that we can keep the amount of exchanged data proportional to the size of the cache difference; and we show by simulation that our method is practical to implement.