HyunYoung Lee and Jennifer L. Welch

This paper presents a specification of a randomized shared queue that can lose some elements or return them out of order, and shows that the specification can be implemented with the probabilistic quorum algorithm of Malkhi and Reiter (1997) and Malkhi, Reiter, and Wright (1997). Distributed algorithms that incorporate the producer-consumer style of interprocess communication are candidate applications for using random shared queues in lieu of the message queues. The modified algorithms will inherit positive attributes concerning load and availability from the underlying queue implementation. The behavior of a generic combinatorial optimization algorithm, when it is implemented using random queues, is analyzed.