Fault-tolerant data management in the Gaston peer-to-peer file system

Gaston is a peer-to-peer large-scale file system designed to provide a fault-tolerant and highly available file service for a virtually unlimited number of users. Data management in Gaston disseminates and stores replicas of files on multiple machines to achieve the requested level of data availability and uses a dynamic free-topology structure to connect replication schema members. We present generic algorithms for replication schema creation and maintenance according to file user requirements and autonomous constraints that are set on individual nodes. We also show specific data object structure as well as mechanisms for secure and efficient update propagation among replicas with data consistency control. Finally, we introduce a scalable and efficient technique improving fault-tolerance of the tree-topology structure connecting replicas.