Abstract
Along with the trend towards low cost, high performance computer systems and the widespread availability of the Internet, Peer to Peer (P2P) technology is receiving increased attention. One aspect of P2P, decentralized storage utilizing optimistic concurrency control, suffers from a number of problems such as the detection of collisions and the resolution of conflicts. Solutions to date have been application-specific. This paper proposes a new data management structure dubbed WOODS (Write Once Oriented Data management Structure) which does not require conflict resolution for applications such as email, where only read and append access in required and where the order of concurrent updates is not crucial. The paper applies WOODS to a mailing list system, demonstrating that inter-application synchronization is not required for concurrent updates and that it can be used even when the network is partitioned and later reintegrated.
