2025/12/23 by Tanisha Fonseca, Gengrui Zhang, Fonseca, Tanisha +1
Computer Science · #Distributed #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Software System Performance and Reliability #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.20485
openalex publication_date 2025/12/23 · openalex created_date 2025/12/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Modern distributed systems face a critical challenge: existing consensus protocols optimize for either node heterogeneity or workload independence, but not both. For example, Cabinet leverages weighted quorums to handle node heterogeneity but serializes all operations through a global leader, limiting parallelism. EPaxos enables parallel execution for independent operations but treats all nodes uniformly, ignoring performance differences. To tackle this problem, we present WOC, a dual-path consensus protocol that dynamically routes operations into two paths based on their access patterns. Independent operations execute through a fast path that uses object-specific weighted quorums and completes in one network round-trip. Conflicting or shared objects route through a leader-coordinated slow path employing node-weighted consensus. Our evaluation demonstrates that WOC achieves up to 4X higher throughput than Cabinet for workloads with >70% independent objects, while maintaining equivalent performance under high contention.