Footloose: a case for physical eventual consistency and selective conflict resolution

Abstract

Users are increasingly inundated with small devices with communication and storage capabilities. Unfortunately, the user is still responsible for reconciling all of the devices whenever a change is made. We present Footloose, a usercentered data store that can share data and reconcile conflicts across diverse devices. Footloose is an optimistic system based on physical eventual consistency-consistency based on the movement of devices-and selective conflict resolution-which allows conflicts to flow through devices that cannot resolve the conflict to devices the can. Using these techniques, Footloose can present consistent views of data on the devices closest to the user without user interaction.

Exploiting Our Computational Surroundings for Better Mobile Collaboration

“…The incorporation of NRCs is evaluated against two variants: NRCs do not exist (NoNRCs); and NRCs carry enough information to emulate complete offline AE [16,8,14] (FullNRCs). All variants were simulated in the same conditions and with the same randomization seeds.…”

“…The exploitation of non-replica nodes is already permitted by systems such as Bayou [16], Rumor [8], or Footloose [14]. However, they require non-replica nodes to carry complete anti-entropy information, instead of meta-data; the implicit memory requirements will thus be prohibitive for a significant number of nodes, especially in resourceconstrained mobile environments.…”

“…Some proposed solutions support off-line AE [16,8,14], which enables a first solution: to make non-replicas carry enough information to emulate AE between A and B. However, AE includes propagating some representation of replica modifications.…”

Combining Mobile and Cloud Storage for Providing Ubiquitous Data Access

“…However, this approach makes it impossible for a user to access all his data in a new computer. Footloose [9] introduces the concept of physical eventual consistency, allowing portable devices to be used to automatically propagate updates amongst replicas. FEW extends the approach of Footloose by allowing clients to obtain data contents from other replicas (even outside the system), thus minimizing the requirements of the mobile devices.…”

“…In this paper, we present the FEW Phone File System (FEW), a data management system for providing high data availability to mobile users. While sharing some of the goals and solutions with existing systems [19,9,12,2,16,15], FEW provides a unique solution for offering users ubiquitous access to their personal data, independently of their location, device and/or network connectivity. To this end, FEW builds on the characteristics of current mobile phones, taking advantage of their i) storage capacity; ii) wireless communication capabilities (Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth); iii) mobility of such devices.…”