Group testing and fault detection for replicated files

Abstract

A file in a distributed database system is replicated on M sites and may contain corrupted pages. The purpose of this paper is to apply a group testing technique to detect corrupted pages in these replicated files. Our detection scheme, based on the structure of the Reed-Solomon code as proposed by Abdel-Ghaffar and El Abbadi, is optimal for M greater than or equal to 4 and has performance guarantee of (7)-(6) for M = 3. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.