A Distributed Coordination Algorithm for a Heterogeneous Group of Peers

In distributed applications like computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), multiple peer processes are required to cooperate to make a global decision, e.g. fix a date for a meeting of multiple persons. We discuss how multiple peer processes make a decision to achieve some objectives in a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network. Here, every process is assumed to be peer and autonomous. A domain of a process is a collection of possible values which the process can take. Each process first takes a value v in its domain and notifies the other processes of the value v. A process can change the value to another value on receipt of values from other processes. However, a process may not take every value in the domain and can take only some value depending on the value v. For example, a process may abort after notifying commit but cannot commit after abort in the commitment control. An existentially dominant relation shows what values a process can take after taking a value. In addition, values are also ordered in the preferential relation. Based on the existential and preferential relations, each process takes the most preferable value in the domain, which is dominantly preceded by the value v. In this paper, we discuss how every process makes an agreement on a tuple of values while each process can change the value according to the existential and preferential relations. In this paper, we discuss a coordination protocol in a type of heterogeneous system where every pair of processes have the same domain but may have different existential and preferential relations. Each process learns a part of the relations of another process through exchanging values